


Green Man From Outer Space

by Ardatli



Category: Young Avengers (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Hijinks & Shenanigans, M/M, Raised-as-an-alien Teddy, Roswell, Teddy is the Roswell Alien, and some angsty crushing, except for Teddy who is a Skrull/Kree hybrid as always
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2019-11-03 23:47:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 68,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17887448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ardatli/pseuds/Ardatli
Summary: The one where the year is 1947, Prince Dorrek crashes his ship at Roswell, Bill Kaplan is an astronomer with a problem, and life gets complicated from there.





	1. Chapter 1

* * *

 

_Don’t go to Earth_ , that’s what every lecture about interstellar travel had drummed in to all of them practically since birth. _It’s a planet full of trigger-happy apes still learning which end of the atom is up._ The new Kree-Skrull treaty even added a section about proscribed planets, ones with which both empires were forbidden to engage, and Earth was right at the top of the list.

It wasn’t that Dorrek _intended_ to break the rules, it was just that the brief glimpses he’d intercepted on the comms had been so _interesting_. 

And then there had been the wreck of a probe, floating in the Khyber belt around Ceti Prime. He’d had the engineers pull it in to take a closer look. They’d grumbled about it, sure, but it wasn’t like they were going to say no to the Crown Prince even if he _was_ taking a few unauthorized liberties.

The probe – or satellite, or whatever it was – had come with more than just Earth germs.

(And honestly, sterile decontamination would have fixed all of that, if the hard radiation of space hadn’t eradicated everything already. What could possibly come in on a probe—even if it was an Earth-probe—that could get the medical officer’s frill turning purple with irritation, or flush red for anxiety?)

It had carried music. Music, and codes to be broken, equations and ideas—things Dorrek pored over in his quarters, teasing out the secrets of this strange, forbidden world.

So he’d acted on impulse, something he was only able to get away with because everyone still thought of him as a reckless hatchling. It had only been a very small science vessel, after all. No-one would ever notice him missing, not for a tenday or more. He was supposed to be studying, and in a way, he was.

Floating outside the orbit of their moon, far enough away that their instruments wouldn’t pick him up, he studied Earth.

(Everyone had agreed on that point, at least—the planet’s residents would never know he was there. Earth might be tottering slowly toward spaceflight, but they didn’t have even the most rudimentary planetary defences, or system sensors. They were too busy fighting each other to look outward. Two of their sun-orbits ago, there had been an explosion on the planet’s surface so large that the empire’s sensor networks had picked it up. _Nuclear_ , one of the exo-physicists had told him, when he’d asked. _Another symptom of their barbarity. Now come, your highness, you have work yet to complete._ )

The Great Peace had done a lot of good for the empire, Dorrek considered ruefully, but cramming a million years worth of battles, treaties and embargoes, legal precedents and cross-cultural etiquette into his head made him long for the days when all an emperor had to do was send an army in and lay waste.

At least back then there hadn’t been _exams_.

And at least here, his engines turned off and no-one in the small round ship but him, he could look in on his favourite escapist entertainment and not have to think about the crushing weight of responsibility that was breathing down his neck.

Dorrek spun around in the pilot’s seat, put his feet up on the control panel, and swiped his hand through the holographic controls. The broadcast signals always took a little while to solidify, and he waited for the shaky black-and-white images to coalesce.

_“June 14 th, 1947 – welcome to your nightly news.” _The sound kicked in before the visuals, and Dorrek closed his eyes for a moment. What would it be like, living down there? Not knowing anything about the vast and busy galaxy outside the planetary system, being so totally unaware of the most mundane aspects of galactic empire.

It would be easier, surely. To take life one day at a time, only have to worry about one tiny planet—or better yet, one little continent on one tiny planet—and let the rest of the universe carry on without him, far, far away.

He could do it, run away to Earth for a little while. He could blend in. He’d seen enough of their media broadcasts to know what the average human male looked like. Yellow hair, blue eyes, a flat jaw instead of segmented, skin of a shade similar to the pink Kree, but with a little more cream in it. Dorrek shifted to that to test the feeling, the ripple of change passing over and through his skin quicker than he could consciously construct the image.

The beeping in the cockpit started while he had his eyes closed, and the second it took him to open them was a second too long. The blast caught the thrusters on the right side of the survey vessel’s disc, knocking him out of his carefully plotted orbit.

The second hit knocked the ship sideways and flung him to the floor even as he scrambled for the controls. The ship flipped upside down, gravity controls frying and making ‘upside down’ irrelevant a moment later. The vessel hurtled through space faster than the inertial dampeners were designed to handle, spinning over and over again until he was absolutely sure he was going to be sick. 

His comm system crackled into life, a new and unfamiliar voice gloating overtop of the calm and steady voice of the Earth newscaster.

“Death to the Skrull conquerors! Blood and fire for Hala!”

The blue-green planet below raced up to meet him, the ship careening out of control. Dorrek struggled for air, lost his lunch, his blood boiling in the heat-blast of unshielded planetary entry-

He passed out as the force fields finally kicked in, just in time to feel the edge of the saucer slam into the ground.

Everything stopped, and everything went black.

* * *

Bill Kaplan had the kind of job that didn’t lend itself to panicked drives into the desert at two in the morning. Not the ‘panicked’ part, anyway. Normally he’d be back at the observatory with his head down in his telescopes, or home in bed, sleeping off the previous night’s research binges. But tonight—tonight things had been in the sky that shouldn’t have been. It was only by sheer dumb luck and coincidence that he’d caught sight of the edge of the fireball as the whatever-it-was had landed.

Flinging his plans to the wind and launching himself down the observatory stairs, he’d made it to his car and down the winding road toward Roswell before really stopping to catch his breath. The glow of the meteor strike had faded from the horizon minutes after the object had landed. Now he had nothing but a paper map, his memory of the trajectory, and half a tank of gas to get him to ground zero.

Broken limbs and singed leaves on the trees kept him hurtling down the back-country roads long after he’d lost track of where he was on the map. The meteor had fallen on a shallow trajectory—strange, unless it had hit something that could have changed its direction... Bill pulled the car over to the shoulder and got out, staring at the place where, by all rights, the impact crater should have been.

There was no crater. There was a long trench dug into the ground, then open space, then another, similar gouge in the earth. As though something had landed, then skipped, then landed again.

He left his coat and hat in the car, didn’t care about anything except digging his box brownie camera out of the trunk before he set off across the field at a run. The flash – wait; he couldn’t do any kind of documentation without it.

It was then, stopped for a moment at the still-smoking edge of the second trench, the grass burned away and the ground warm beneath his feet, that Bill heard the voice.

Not a voice, a moan, like someone hurt, and it was coming from somewhere close to the edge of the trench.

He’d passed a driveway, there was a ranch nearby. What if it was one of the ranch hands, struck by debris, or burned by the incredible heat of an object disintegrating in the atmosphere?

It didn’t take more than that to convince him. He slid down the new-cut trench, grabbing at the dirt with his bare hands to slow himself down, pieces of molten rock snagging his slacks and sportscoat, digging in to his bare hands.

_Someone is hurt out here, and I’m the only one who can help._

When you put it like that, what did a few scrapes matter?

  _But that._.. Bill stopped dead (poor choice of words) and stared at the scene in front of him.

The object at the end of the trench was no asteroid or meteorite, nothing at all like the ragged-edged chunks of space rock he’d first seen in undergrad. Where the rocks had been sooty and melted-looking, this object was smooth and round, almost disc-shaped. It was hard to tell exactly, with the front—side? Back?—lodged deep into the ground. It was far larger than the fist-sized lumps of asteroids they had on display in the museum, big enough to be... a ship? A transport?

_But who? And from where?_

The moan sounded again, jolting Bill into action. Soil had collapsed along the edge of the trench, some piece of the disc fallen off during the crash and dislodging the rocks with the impact. And beneath it, a hand, looking as human as anything Bill had ever seen.

_The rancher._

The man was still breathing, his chest rising in shallow bursts as Bill flung the smaller rocks away, dug him out of the dirt with his bare hands. His camera bounced against his hip, half-forgotten until it was in the way, and he flung it aside in frustration.

By all rights the man should have been crushed—broken by the impact, or the trench collapse, or whatever it was that had first knocked him flat. The worst of his injuries were a piece of jagged metal sticking out of his sternum and a deep gash on his head, just above his eye. Weirdly, that almost seemed to get smaller as Bill brushed the dirt away from the stranger’s face.

Kneeling there in the trench, the injured man unconscious before him, Bill leaned down to get a better look.

_Holy Hannah._

He’d never seen a more perfectly beautiful man in his life. Fair haired, with a movie-star jaw, he was— well, he was far too pretty to be bleeding in the gouged-out earth, in a rancher’s field.

The man’s eyes opened. Blue. They were so blue that they seemed unreal, too intense, too bright, too... _too much_. Bill’s breath caught in his throat, the bells and alarms in the back of his brain that screamed _danger_ kicking into high overdrive.

The bright blue had to be a trick of the moonlight, but there were worse things than unnaturally-coloured eyes.

Blond, blue-eyed and young, his hands broad, and—from what Bill could see of his body shape under the strange dark uniform he had on—muscled and fit… the stranger could have stepped straight out of any one of the Third Reich’s recruitment posters.

_And I know very well what men like that have done to men like me._

But even as Bill froze, the man began to cough, and better instincts took over. Even if this man was a German, even if he’d somehow crashed a secret Nazi plane into a New Mexico ranch, in this moment he was still just a human being.

And he wasn’t armed, which didn’t make Bill’s next move quite as stupid as it might have been.

“Hold still, I’m going to stabilize the shrapnel and then we’re going to get you to a doctor,” he ordered. His tie would do for a start, to stop the shard from moving and doing more damage than it had already done.

Except the man fumbled with his hand, his eyes still clouded and unfocused. He grabbed the metal and yanked it out before Bill could stop him, flinging it away to land with a clink against some stones.

“No!” Bill lunged forward, pressing his hands down against what was sure to be a bubbling puncture wound, God only knew if it had gone into his lungs, or – what else was in there? Stomach?

The guy was built like a tank, Bill’s hands finding only solid muscle and a little bit of blood dampening his palms. Maybe it hadn’t gone as deep as he’d thought? But how? He was trying to sit up and Bill reached out on autopilot, his brain spinning. He clasped the man’s arm, helped him sit up with a hand to his back for support.

“What happened?” Bill blurted out, rather than let himself think about dangerous things. “Did that thing land on you? Where are you hurt? It’s not far to the ranch-house, but I don’t know how long it will be before they can get an ambulance out from Roswell this time of night.”

“No, don’t call anyone,” the man said, and he coughed, dirt embedded in his skin and blood dark against his hair. He had an American accent, flat and Midwestern, not from around here. And not from home, either, no sign of the rapid New York patter that Bill had only just begun to shake after three years in the desert.

Most importantly, not Axis. Not the enemy.

“I’ll be alright, I just need-”

“You need a doctor,” Bill insisted. “You were knocked out, that could have done more damage than you know.”

The man smiled, weirdly enough, a flicker of something at the corners of his mouth. He shook his head, first experimentally, tentatively, and then again as though he’d realized it didn’t hurt. “I think I’ll be alright. I don’t want to go to a medic. Do you have water, or...” it was then that he looked around, his eyes landing on the sleek, shining hull of the whatever-it-was, and Bill swore he could see the blood drain from the stranger’s face. When he swore under his breath it was in a language that Bill didn’t recognize, but the tone was more than enough to get the meaning across.

A hint of a suspicion started to tingle in the back of Bill’s mind, but he shoved it away.

Impossible things always turned out to be explainable. That was why he’d gone into science when he had. How he’d ended up lucky enough to serve in the war in some way other than fighting, or freezing in the trenches.

Except now he was sitting in a very different kind of trench, with a man who was regaining his colour by the moment. And who was trying to stand up.

“Sit down!” Bill ordered, and surprise flashed across the stranger’s face.

“I need to get up, I need to get out of here,” he insisted. And for some reason, he looked _up_ , nervously scanning the sky.

And he was going to ignore Bill’s very good advice and get up anyway, so Bill rose as well. He got himself underneath the man’s arm, settled his weight on Bill’s shoulders. _He is a whole lot heavier than he looks._ He had to be almost entirely muscle, muscle and heat and a body pressed close against his.  

“I’m Bill, by the way,” he introduced himself, as he slowly picked his way up the shallowest side of the collapsing trench, the stranger’s arm over his shoulders and their steps small and careful. He didn’t give his last name yet. Just in case.

There was a lengthy pause, then, “Derek,” the man replied, or at least that’s what it sounded like.

“Well, Derek,” Bill said, and Derek’s shoulders shook like he was suppressing a laugh—why?— “if you won’t go to a hospital, and you won’t let me call someone to come to you, where do I take you? I’ve got a car, but I need to buy gas to get you any further than town. But I can get you to a phone. Who do you need me to call?”

They reached the top of the trench and the unburned grass and Derek let go, sagged down to sit on the field. He splayed his hands out and stared around him as though he was seeing everything for the first time —a field, a tree, Bill himself-

_His wound is gone._ The gash that Bill had tried to clean himself was nothing more now than a line of dried blood. It was impossible to see more clearly than that in the darkness. One thing Bill could see now was the unfamiliar dark purple and black uniform, shredded now by the rocks and the force of the impact. The fabric – it wasn’t torn, per se. It was stretching itself across Derek’s skin as he watched, as though the fibres themselves were trying to knit themselves back into a whole.

Derek looked up at the stars, then, fear and helplessness flashing across his face for an instant.

Bill, crouched beside him, saw a galaxy reflected in Derek’s too-bright blue eyes. 

He reached out and set his hand on Derek’s shoulder, a gesture of comfort, nothing more.

Derek turned his head and brushed his cheek against Bill’s hand. An accident, nothing more.  

But in that instant of connection, skin to skin and eyes to eyes, a spark of _knowing_ , of _understanding_ , (of attraction, let’s be real here for a moment, _William_ ) flew between them.

“Who are you?” Bill found himself asking. “What is that thing?”

“What would you say,” Derek said, speaking slowly, each word weighed and measured. “If I told you that I was not from here.”

“I’d say that was pretty damned obvious,” Bill shot back, unable to help himself.

Derek smiled, his lips quirking up at the corners. “What if I said I was from out there.” He nodded to the stars. “That I was the prince of a galactic empire, and someone—I don’t know who—wants me dead.”

That rocked Bill back on his heels. He let go of Derek’s shoulder and instantly regretted the loss of contact, the wordless communication that seemed to have been running between them, skin to skin.

_Not possible, not possible, he’s human as I am-_

_The_ spaceship _in the ditch;_

_Surviving something that would have killed a regular man;_

_The cut on his head that isn’t there;_

_The impossible trajectory of the meteorite, that_ would _be possible for a vessel that was spinning out._

_His eyes are too blue._

“I would say,” Bill tested each thing he was going to say, checked the edges for faults. “That saying that kind of thing around here would be the kind of thing that could get a man locked away for insanity. I would say that a man with that kind of story to tell had better be very careful about who he says anything to. Until he knows for sure that he can trust them.”

Derek nodded slowly, his eyes dropping from the black and cloudless sky. “Then my name is Derek, and I’m not a criminal, but I am in trouble. And I need somewhere to stay for a few—” he paused, as though remembering something. “-days. Just until I know that it’s safe to go home.” 

“Can you get home again?” Bill asked, hushed even though there was no-one around for miles who could hear them.

Derek closed his eyes, but he nodded, and his blond hair fell down over his forehead. “Once I know who shot me down-” he blurted out, then winced. “Yes,” he corrected himself, opening his eyes again. “But not right away.”

Bill nodded and he stood. His choices were obvious now, everything laid out in front of him as slick as a star chart. “I’m a scientist,” he offered. “An astronomer. I was in my observatory when I saw the sh- the _meteor_ land. If there’s anyone here who can help you, it’s me.”

“You sound awfully sure of yourself.” Derek _smiled_ , for real this time, and the world tilted on its axis once more.

“That’s because I’m the best, and I’ve got a bunch of certificates on my office wall that say so.”

He held his hand out again, and Derek took it. A spark leapt from one to the other, circled back and settled low in Bill’s gut, the feeling that he could only call by name deep in the night, in the back of his own mind.

_Who knew aliens would be so beautiful?_

Sound travelled in the desert, and sirens in the distance were growing closer. They didn’t have time for him to second-guess himself.

“Come stay with me. My apartment is small, but it’s got a shower, and a bed, and safe space where you can rest. I know a little something about being hunted because of something that you are.” He held still, not even chancing a breath.

“Are you sure?” Derek asked. “What if I’m not safe for you?”

It wasn’t meant as innuendo, Bill was so sure, but he couldn’t help the retort. “Then the possibilities really are endless.” He clamped his mouth shut, because now he was going to be in deep trouble. Flirting wasn’t illegal, but everything it led to still was.

But Derek – maybe he didn’t know, or maybe things were different where he came from. Because he smiled, and there was a flash of something in his eyes that could only be called ‘interest,’ deep behind that bright, clear blue. “Lead onward, then,” he said, his voice a dark exhausted rumble. “The offer of somewhere to rest sounds very appealing right now.”

He must have been hellishly tired, because he fell asleep in Bill’s car on the way home. They passed a couple of state troopers on the way, and then a convoy of military vehicles, all of them going back the way he had just come. Bill killed the car’s lights and pulled away into the darkness of a side lane so they wouldn’t see, wouldn’t stop him and search the car.

Whatever Derek had in his ship—if that’s what it really was—would be long gone into government hands by the time he was well enough to go back. Whatever it was he needed in order to get home, it was going to take a while to get their hands back on it.

Bill looked over at the man curled up beside him, his head resting on his bent arm, his eyes closed. And there was all the confirmation that he needed. The proof that he was doing the right thing. This stranger who needed help, who seemed to trust him enough already that he would sleep and leave himself so utterly vulnerable.

_I’ll keep you safe, no matter what I have to do. I swear._


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here's the first of the new material that wasn't in the previously-posted short. And off we goooo!

Dorrek shouldn’t have slept on the way to the earthman’s residence, but he could only chalk it up to trauma. At least the pain was gone by the time he opened his eyes again, the change in movement alerting him as the vehicle pulled to a stop.

He certainly shouldn’t have trusted his rescuer with the truth. He could practically hear K’lrrt’s screech of horror in his ears at the breach in protocol. But his head had been swimming and there had been kindness and concern in Bill’s dark eyes, a pull at Dorrek’s middle that had made him want to spill everything.

That, and he’d had little other choice. He hadn’t been able to pull his thoughts together fast enough through the disorientation and the pain to spin a convincing lie. He’d have needed to watch many more hours of their broadcasts in order to pull that sort of thing off effectively.

The vehicle ground to a shuddering halt in a parking lot in front of a small apartment building made of red stone. One of the windows was lit from the inside, falls of fabric turning the occupants into moving shadows, the rest were dark. The building felt cold just to look at, ancient, remote and unwelcoming. 

And this was the safehouse? Dorrek sat up fully, glancing at his driver. “Is this it?” The darkness made it hard to see clearly so Dorrek shifted his eyes to a shape that took in more of the ambient light.

“I know it’s not much, but it’s what I’ve got.” Bill was already getting out of his seat, his foot down on the ground when he glanced back. He looked at Dorrek, leaned in to look closer, and did a double-take that ended with him yelping, tipping backward and sliding halfway out of the car.

“Hey!” Dorrek fumbled with the door beside him. He hadn’t been watching when Bill had opened his side, hadn’t paid any attention at all when he’d gotten in (he heard K’lrrt screech at him again for abandoning all his safety protocols), and now he had no idea what any of the dials or cranks did. _Cranks?_ Everything was manual, without a touchscreen or key code in sight.

He finally found something that looked like a lever and he pulled it. It broke off in his hand.

Dorrek reversed course and pushed himself up and over the guidance control stick in between the seats and out Bill’s open door.

By now the human had scrambled to his feet and was trying to fend Dorrek off with one hand, pointing at his face. “Your eyes. What the hell was that?”

“My what?” Dorrek stopped dead. Obviously Bill was alright and didn’t need help, but- “Oh! The night vision. Does that bother you?”

“That your eyes suddenly look like an alligator’s? Only a little, yeah,” Bill rallied and drew himself tall, his rapid-fire words sharper and more cutting than anything Dorrek had heard out of him so far. Except-

“An alligator?” Dorrek frowned, his eye-slits narrowing.

“Oh God, don’t do that. That’s just wrong.” Bill shook his head, and he drew closer. “Assuming you’re not just putting me on—alligator. Big lizard. Lives in swamps, lots of teeth, eats people?” 

“Sorry, none of the above,” Dorrek replied, perhaps more cheerfully than the moment called for. But he was alive, at least for the moment, he’d found an ally—at least for the moment—and the tingling rush of his healing factor finishing to the injuries and internal bleeding from the crash left him light-headed and a little giddy. “But if it’s a problem, I can change back.”

“Yeah,” Bill replied, dragging his hand through that wonderfully wild fall of dark hair and pushing it back from his eyes. He dropped his voice low and stepped in closer. “Yeah, that’s a problem. Humans don’t have eyes like that. None of us do. So put those back where they came from, and hopefully we can get inside without anyone asking questions.”

He could probably navigate alright without the night vision, the tall lights along the side of the road and on the awning of the building offering enough ambient glow. Dorrek shifted his eyes back to the human-blue he’d used before. “Better? Also, I think I broke this,” he added apologetically, opening his hand to reveal the splintered-off piece of black metal that had been part of the lever on the door. “At least I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to pop off like that.”

Bill hissed, a sharp intake of breath, and he shook his head. “I have so many questions. _So_ many,” he muttered.

Still, he took the piece back and his fingers brushed Dorrek’s palm, a whisper of skin-on-skin.

There went another one of those odd pauses, like he was distracted by something, then Bill was on the move again. He gestured over his shoulder to encourage Dorrek to follow, and in a few long strides Dorrek caught up to him again.

Stepping through the front door — a manual door! It really was just like their broadcasts!— into a wide lobby area was the first time Dorrek had actually seen Bill in the light, and he took a moment while Bill fumbled with a set of keys to look him over.

It was the first time he’d seen any human up close and in the flesh, rather than on the screen, and he should probably take the opportunity to catch details he’d otherwise have missed.  

Bill was handsome, that was the first thing, though he didn’t fit the archetype that Dorrek had come to expect. Not from the heroes, anyway. Where they were invariably broad-shouldered, Bill was lean. Where their hair was slicked down and combed, his was rumpled and wild. His skin was a darker shade of gold, olive-toned beneath the pink, his cheekbones and his chin finer and more perfectly arched than square-angled and hard. His lips-

That, of course, was the moment Bill managed to engage the lock and get the door open, and turned to catch Dorrek staring. Their gazes held for a minute before Bill looked away.

“I’m on the third floor. The elevator hasn’t worked in months, I’m afraid, so we’re going to have to take the stairs.” Bill hesitated, holding the door open so Dorrek could slip through. “Is that going to be okay? You were pretty badly banged up...” he trailed off, still standing in the door.

He looked up and down the length of Dorrek’s body, his eyes lingering on the place on Dorrek’s chest where the titanium shard had pierced. “...in the crash.”

Dorrek shook his head. “I’m fine to walk up some stairs. I heal fast, remember?”

The look he got was one of disbelief, and Dorrek bit his tongue to remind himself to keep his mouth shut. As much as he liked to think he knew about Earth, its people were still essentially a mystery. He couldn’t afford to alienate the only ally he had.

Their footsteps echoed up and down the empty wooden stairwell, the banisters polished to a high sheen over what had to have been decades, if not centuries, of use. How long did human buildings last for, anyway? Speaking of gaps in his knowledge.

And walking up behind Bill gave Dorrek time to contemplate the human physique. Bill wore a long coat, and pants made of creased rectangles that hid any shape his calves might have, but he’d helped Dorrek up, half-carried him to his car, and when he’d done it Dorrek had been peripherally aware (too aware) of the muscle moving beneath that same long coat.

How did mammals—he knew how _some_ mammal species did things, but even the racier human broadcasts always cut away before any of the more intriguing bits of anatomy were shown.

Add to that the fact that he’d never once seen any evidence that humans were interested in anything other than male-female couplings, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that those were questions he definitely should not be asking.  

Maybe Bill would have a book.

It would have to have pictures, though, since Dorrek barely knew how to decipher their writing.

Another wooden door and hallway later and Bill was unlocking one with a couple of symbols on the front. Numbers, Dorrek decided, and memorized their shapes. A small box was attached to the door frame on his right side, a hands-breath below the top of the frame. It was painted to match the door frame, all but invisible. If it was a sensor or an alarm system it was inert, and Bill didn’t seem to notice it at all. Dorrek shot it a look, his nerves now all on edge, but nothing happened when he followed Bill into the apartment.

The reality of his situation started to reassert itself, his heart picking up speed as he stepped across the threshold.  

If this was a setup, if Bill was an enemy instead of a potential friend… if his attackers had somehow managed to recruit from among the humans… this would be the moment Dorrek found out.

* * *

There was an alien in Bill’s apartment. Oh God.

Until the parking lot he’d half anticipated that Derek would turn out to be a German spy. Maybe the thing in the crash hadn’t been a _German_ ship, but there were a lot of ways to sneak people in to a country unnoticed. And hadn’t the Nazi science division supposedly been working on all kinds of crazy stuff? No, he was relatively certain that he was going to bring tall, blond and handsome back to his place and then get arrested for aiding and abetting the enemy. Or worse.

His anxiety had built as he drove, half-prepared by the time he got home to lunge for the gun in the glove compartment the moment Derek woke up.

Except then there had been the thing with his eyes, and Bill had to come to terms very quickly with the reality of his situation.

There was an alien in his apartment. Or the Nazis had developed the ability to turn people into shapeshifting monsters.

He wasn’t entirely sure which was worse.

Bill flipped on the hall light as he passed by, his body functioning on autopilot even while his mind was screaming.

What was he supposed to do now? He had a Ph.D. in astronomy, for crying out loud, and even his years of staring up at the stars and wondering hadn’t come close to preparing him for this. He was good at science, not science fiction.

Whatever the alien had been expecting to see, Bill was pretty damn sure his sparsely-furnished apartment wasn’t it. It was little more than a place to store his clothes and bed, most of his waking hours spent at the lab. All he’d wanted was a place he could afford, within reasonable driving distance from the college, and he hadn’t been too picky.

A sofa that had seen better days sat against the far wall, along with a couple of armchairs that had once been part of his landlady’s matching set. She’d taken pity on the obviously out-of-his-depth post-doc from New York who’d shown up on her doorstep, and had given him her old chairs rather than put them out for the dump. There was a table and only two chairs behind the half-height wall that blocked off the kitchen—because it wasn’t like he had people over for dinner much—a relatively nice-quality black and white television with a polished wooden cabinet, and the rest was windows and bookshelves. Those, at least, were full.

The dark door on the far wall led to his small bedroom and smaller bathroom, neither of which were anywhere near clean or uncluttered enough for someone else to see them.

“So, uh.” Bill dropped his overcoat on the chair nearest him, and rubbed his hands down his face, trying to ... trying to _anything_. “My plan had been to take care of any injuries you got in that crash, but apparently that’s not a problem.” He stared at the really unfairly beautiful man he’d brought home, and had a hard time finding words. Drink. What he needed was a drink.

“Do you drink?” Bill blurted out. “Or eat? What do you eat? Oh my God, you’re an alien and you’re standing in my living room. I have no idea what to do with this information.”

And the alien — he _laughed_ , ducking his head in a gesture that looked almost human. “I eat, yes. But I won’t impose on you any longer than necessary.” He got serious again, tall and regal and watchful in his strange, tight space suit. “If I can use your communication system, I can get a message back to my grandfather. I have to let him know I’m alive.”

“My... you mean my telephone?” Bill blinked at him. “No, of course you don’t. Why would an alien have a phone number. You want ... what, exactly?”

“Any deep-space comm array will do,” Derek said confidently, and Bill could only shake his head. Derek’s face started to fall. “No laser-based communications?”

“No laser communications.”

“Sub-space relay systems?”

Bill shook his head again. “We managed to get a monkey into space last month,” he offered in faint consolation. “Strapped to a V2 liquid propellant rocket engine. His name was Albert.”

Derek frowned. “Was?”

“Yeah.” Bill scrubbed the back of his neck with his palm, suddenly facing down the pathetic level of Earth’s rocket program. “He, uh. Suffocated on the way back down. We’re not exactly great at the space thing yet.”

Derek nodded, folding his arms and looking down at his boots with a frown. “I don’t suppose the Kree dropped off any Omni-wave projectors?” he asked after a moment, looking resigned already.

“I don’t even know what those are.”

“Which, Kree or Omni-waves?”

“Either. Both. You pick.”

Derek glanced toward the dark window. What was he seeing out there? The stars, beckoning him homeward? Bill felt a shiver settle low in his spine. “I suppose radio waves won’t cut it,” he asked, his voice feeling unnaturally loud in the sudden quiet of the room.

“They’re too slow, they don’t go far enough. I had to keep my ship in the same orbital distance as your moon in order to pick them up in anything close to real time.”

Derek’s head-shake carried more pathos than any more personal comment he could have made, and for a moment Bill thought he glimpsed some terrible grief on Derek’s face. It might have been his imagination, must have been, because a moment later it was gone and his jaw was set and determined again. “I’ll need to get back to my ship, in that case. The transmitters there can still be fixed, I’m sure of it. Will you help me?” He looked over his shoulder, body half-turned to the shadow, and Bill was staring again into eyes that were too damn blue to be real.  

Bill was going to wake up the next morning brutally hung over, that was the obvious answer. He, Nate and Cassandra had decided to tie one on at the lab celebrating something, and now he was having a lucid dream – or an extremely detailed hallucination. He found himself nodding, his lips dry and heart racing.

“Of course. Of course I’ll help you. After all, when does a guy like me finally get to talk to an alien face to face? I’ll get a Nobel prize for this one. Except I can’t,” Bill realized out loud, letting go of that brief-but-heady thought. “Because to prove it they’d want to study you, and you don’t want to get caught up in anything like that. Humans are a pretty primitive species when it comes to treating others like people. Even among ourselves.” _Especially among ourselves_.

“That’s one of the reasons I’m going to be in big trouble when I do get back home,” Derek admitted, chagrin writing itself across his face as he finally turned fully away from the window. “There’s an embargo on this system. You’re considered too violent and primitive to be allowed contact with other species.”

“Of course there is,” Bill sighed, finally settling back into his own skin. He stripped off his coat and tossed it over the back of his chair. Had his brain finally caught up to the whole concept, or was he just going numb to the weird? “And of course we are. Humans are terrible.”

Alright. He needed a plan. A yawn split his face wide as his adrenaline finally died away and exhaustion caught up. He covered it with the back of his hand, then rubbed at his face to try and keep himself alert. “The crash site is going to be crawling with police and the army tonight. There’s nothing we can do for the next few hours at least. And I don’t know what aliens do about rest, but I need to catch a couple of hours of sleep before I try and do any thinking.”

Derek nodded. “And then in the morning we’ll go back for my ship?”

“And find out how bad the damage is, and what you’ll need to fix it. Then I have to go back to the observatory. I ran out of there when I saw your ship come down, and I’ll have to let my colleagues know what happened. I’ll tell them…” Bill hesitated. “A weather balloon. There are plenty of those around. We can pick up tools there as well, if there’s anything you’ll need.”

In the mean time… “Clothes. You’re going to need clothes. You can’t go around in that-” Bill gestured at Derek’s space suit. “Whatever that is. If we’re going to stop people from asking nosy questions, you’ll have to have a cover story.” He yawned again, shaking his head to try and chase the cobwebs out from the corners of his brain. “Sorry. It’s been a – it’s ridiculous to say it’s been a long day when you were just _shot down out of space_.”

“There’s hardly a fair basis for comparison.” Why was Derek’s voice so kind? “Go take your rest cycle. If I can stay here-” he looked around the room and settled down on the couch. “This will do nicely. Unless it’s where you sleep?”

“Me? No,” and Bill was relatively proud of the way his voice didn’t crack at the idea of both of them, lying side by side on the couch- “I have a room in the back. A room for the bed. A bedroom. Just, um. Make yourself at home. And don’t put your boots on the furniture.”

_Oh for crying out loud, Kaplan._

Bill fled to his bedroom before he could say something else excruciatingly stupid, the feeling of his foot firmly lodging itself in his mouth something he was all too familiar with.

Okay, fine, this was fine. He had an alien in his living room. And tomorrow he was going to need to find an excuse for tonight that Nate would believe, as well as try to help said fugitive alien to get back off the planet before he was tracked down either by his own enemies… or Bill’s.

Because the Axis forces might have been beaten, but they weren’t gone. And there were a lot of people who would do a lot to get their hands on a real live alien. Including some who would make sure he wasn’t a _live_ specimen for very long.

No problem.

Billy threw off his clothes, dirty from the skid he’d made down the dusty hillside, and hauled on clean pajamas. Derek would want to wash and change as well, if aliens had the same notion of comfort as people did… There was no way a man that size was going to fit into Bill’s suits, but there was an undershirt that had always been baggy on him, and a pair of pajama pants with some stretch to the cotton. That would have to do for tonight. And tomorrow? Tomorrow would have to take care of itself.

Bill headed down the narrow, dark hallway, the light on in the living room a beacon guiding him back. “Derek? I brought you a change of clothes, a towel and washcloth-” He broke off, standing in the doorway and watching as Derek finished pulling off his boot. The heavy-soled high boots were military-looking and solid. Without them on, Derek looked just like a regular guy (a stupidly handsome one, mind you, with the kind of body Bill had only ever seen in the Physique pictorials and body magazines he’d shoved under his mattress as a teen).

He looked up at Bill’s entrance and responded with a faint smile. “Dorrek,” he corrected Bill’s pronounciation. “Dorrek the eighth, technically, but just ‘Dorrek’ is fine.”

“Got it. There’s soap in the bathroom,” Bill barrelled on, crossing the room to hand Dorrek the pile of supplies. “And the water pressure on the shower’s not too bad. Just watch out because the hot water runs out quickly in the mornings.”

“Water?” Dorrek cocked his head inquisitively. “For bathing?”

“Sure. What else?”

“Ultrasound is a lot more efficient, and you don’t need to waste water through the ship’s recycler.”

“Yeah, well,” Bill sighed and shook his head. “We’re not on a ship, ultrasound technology hasn’t advanced far enough to do anything about sweat, and you may as well accept that at least for tonight, you’re roughing it with primitives.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Dorrek objected, sitting up and his eyes widening. “I’m grateful, of course. There’s just… a lot to learn.”

_I can teach you alllll you want to know about showers…_

Nope. Bill stepped on that line of thinking right away, even though he couldn’t force himself to start walking back to the bedroom. _He probably doesn’t even have human … parts. Alien. Could be tentacles down there for all you know._

That didn’t help nearly as much as it should have.

“It’s fine,” Bill reassured him. “I’m just tired and my mouth likes to take off without me when that happens. You’ll be okay out here?”

Dorrek nodded. “I’ll be fine. And thank you- for everything you’ve done.”

The tips of Bill’s ears flushed warm and Dorrek stared at them, his smile turning into something more like delight. “You’re welcome. And it’s just what anyone would do, for someone in need.”

“If that’s true, then we’ve sadly underestimated humankind.” Dorrek said, a wry smile tugging up at one corner of his mouth. Exhaustion warred with curiosity, the pull of sleep doing battle with Bill’s desperate need to sit down with him, pry into his past and his thoughts about his future, greedily gulp down everything he could learn about the man and commit it to memory.

“Maybe not, then.” Bill took a step back, pulling out of the bubble of intensity and still air that had built itself around them while he’d stared. The moment popped, the tension he’d imagined dissipating like smoke. “Goodnight, Dorrek. If you need anything, I’m right down the hall.”

“I’ll find you if I do. Goodnight, Bill,” he replied, the last sentence sounding like the words were unfamiliar to him, shapes he needed to find new on his tongue.

Bill flung himself into his small, cold bed.  _What if he’s gone in the morning?_

Despite his dire predictions and the excitement of the night, the presence of another being in the small apartment, he quickly fell into a sound and dreamless sleep.

* * *

Dorrek’s night passed with much less sleep involved. The lounger he lay on wasn’t exactly comfortable, the blanket scratchy and something pointy sticking into his hip, but a hideout didn’t usually come with luxury accommodations. It was the sounds, more than anything. The noises that came along with this entirely alien world.

He was used to thrusters and the electronic hum of vast information systems and lighting arrays, of the guards marching and drilling, voices raised in plainchant from the temple grounds… not strange metallic clanking noises, or the hollow, echoing rush of water he couldn’t see. Then there were the violent animal sounds from outside, a vivid yowling followed by deep barks and a crash of lightweight metal-

 _Ingrate._ His host had run an enormous risk by taking him in, one so huge that the human absolutely couldn’t begin to grasp what he’d done.

Dorrek needed to focus on his next steps, making plans for how he was going to keep himself safe, how to find out if his attackers thought he was dead or if they were searching for him, how to alert the Emperor to the danger.

So much depended on what they found in the morning: how much of his ship was still intact, what he could salvage from the wreckage. Find out who had shot him from the sky. ‘Death to the Skrull Conquerors’ had been pretty explicit, mind you. It wasn’t an internal faction, unless that in itself had been a smokescreen… a means to take out the heir and lay the blame at someone else’s feet.

On the other hand, what if it was more than just Dorrek they were after? The Great Peace – the Empire itself – could be next.

His head hurt and he rolled over again, closed his eyes and tried to force sleep.

Earth was such a small world by comparison, their problems so simple. Xavin and Mac would lose their minds if they knew how easily he had decided to trust a human, but Bill couldn’t possibly be a danger to him. He was sure of that much, even when everything else was upside down. Bill was sanctuary, at least for the time being, and surprisingly attractive for a mammal. Hopefully Dorrek hadn’t repaid him for his kindness by bringing war to his doorstep. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Comparative Biology 101, and a little galactic history gets discussed. Also, trouble calls on the phone (Kate. It's Kate.)

Despite everything, Dorrek actually did fall asleep. He couldn’t be sure for how long—his chronometer had stopped working after the crash and Bill didn’t seem to have one—but some time had definitely elapsed when he opened his eyes again, the room growing brighter from the rays of Earth’s sun. The same sound that had woken him up came again, a soft exhale of breath, a muffled clink-

He rolled off the lounger and onto his feet (bare; Lyja and Kl’rt would gleefully kill him for ignoring so many of their survival lessons), grabbing for the blaster on the floor beside his boots and bringing his other fist up in front of him. If this was an attack, he’d face it head-on!

The yelp from across the room didn’t sound all that threatening, though at first glance Dorrek didn’t see… anyone. Oh. Bill’s head slowly reappeared, rising up from behind the counter that divided his cooking station from the main room. “Don’t shoot!” he yelped, his eyes wide.

Parsing it out took half a second: the crash, the rescue, why he was wearing someone else’s clothes.

“Sorry,” Dorrek muttered, his cheeks flushing warm. (Did he blush red when he was pink? He’d never thought to look in the mirror and check. That would be weird.) “I’m a little jumpy, apparently.”

“I can’t imagine why.” Bill’s dry reply came from behind the wall, and the clinking continued – albeit louder, and briefly joined by the sound of running water—as he finished whatever preparations he was making. “Coffee’s on,” he said in a way that sounded content, as though the announcement should mean something good.

Bill came around the corner and into the main room. He was wearing something similar to the clothes he’d had on the day before, the loose pants with the crisp folds down the front of the legs, a shirt with small buttons down the front and a collar that folded over, and a piece of blue silk fabric tied around his throat like a scarf of some kind. The way it was knotted and held flat meant it had to be ceremonial. Rank insignia of some kind, perhaps. His hair looked like it would be damp to the touch, still rumpled despite attempts to comb it down.

He stopped, looked at Dorrek and then _he_ turned red, the flush creeping up his neck and making his cheeks bright.

Dorrek looked down at himself, but nothing was out of place. He’d put on the sleep clothes Bill had left for him the night before. Though he’d had to shrink his shoulders somewhat to put on the short-sleeved top without tearing it, and the soft pants were too snug around his hips and thighs. Bill seemed to have recovered from his surprise by the time Dorrek looked back up, baffled, and Bill cleared his throat.

“Yes, well. Erm. Breakfast. I don’t have much in the fridge—orange juice, shredded wheat—not in the fridge. That’s in the cupboard.” Bill might not be surprised anymore but he was still red around the edges, and his gaze kept wandering downward. “Sausage,” he blurted out, and went deeper red. “Eggs?” he asked, his voice sounding oddly strangled.

“You can’t get good bagels outside of New York, but there’s a diner down the street that does local cuisine, you just have to like things spicy. The cook there likes to try and toughen me up, but it’s good food once you get past the crying.” He ran out of air, resolutely holding eye contact.

“I have no idea what those last few sentences mean, but I appreciate the offer,” Dorrek replied, doing everything in his power not to laugh.

There was something endearing about Bill’s fluster, though it was obviously due to the oddness of the circumstance. First contact with a new species was always awkward, even when you weren’t coming in with a fleet. “And I am hungry — I’ll try whatever you’d make for yourself,” he offered. “If it’s inedible… I’ll just try and find something else.”

“Yeah, that’ll be great,” Bill muttered, “poison the first evidence of other life in the galaxy. That’ll be on my tombstone.” He raked his hand through his hair and it was immediately obvious why it was so rumpled, despite his immediate attempt to pat it back down. “Hell, I don’t even know what you _are_ —but-”

“Skrull,” Dorrek supplied, just so that Bill would leave that question alone. Or at least stop vocalizing it. “Half, anyway. But the side of my family that raised me are of a people called the Skrulls.”

“Skrulls,” Bill repeated, his expression one Dorrek couldn’t read at all. “Okay. What is a Skrull, taxonomically?” He grabbed one of the small chairs by the table, turning it around and sitting down. A burbling sound had started up in the kitchen, and a strong, warm, earthy smell started to fill the room.

Dorrek sat on the arm of the lounger, not sure if he’d been invited to join Bill at the table or not. “As a species, you mean?” He paused, staring down at his folded arms while he rifled through what English he knew that would be useful. “Reptilian?” He offered. “Though my father’s people, the Kree, are mammals.”

“Something’s gone wrong in the translation,” Bill shook his head. “That can’t be right. Reptiles and mammals aren’t cross-fertile.”

“Maybe yours aren’t,” Bill’s look at him was deeply skeptical, and Dorrek shrugged. “I’m no biologist; I only know what I remember from science classes.”

“You know what? I can’t think about this before coffee.” Bill pushed himself to his feet and headed back to the kitchen. Dorrek watched him go, the long, determined strides he took, the play of his shoulders under the thin white shirt.

“You’re taking it all remarkably well, considering,” Dorrek called out to him as consolation. “I’m not exactly Flash Gordon but I promise I’m not Ming the Merciless, either.”

A clatter came from the cooking area along with the sound of scrambling and something falling – no, two things, three? – before Bill reappeared, cups in his hands. “Flash Gordon?” he echoed, incredulous.

“We can pick up your broadcasts, if a ship comes close enough,” Dorrek admitted, a grin playing on his lips. “Humans have some strange ideas about what life is like out there, but the serial stories are entertaining.”

Bill’s eyes narrowed at him, but the smile grew on his face, and for the first time light seemed to reach his eyes. He was luminous, all at once, his open amusement transforming his sharp, handsome features into something so much more. “They’ve been re-airing one of the serials recently. There was an episode airing last night, Cassie had the TV on in the lab. _That’s_ why you were in orbit last night,” he crowed, pointing a finger at Dorrek around the cup he still held. “You were watching _television_.”

“I wasn’t in orbit technically, I was behind your moon. Worst of all, I’m going to miss the final episode if I don’t get out of here,” Dorrek grinned back, the barrier between them beginning to crumble. At the very least, maybe Bill would stop eyeing him like a potential threat.

“I’ve got a TV,” Bill reminded him, shaking his head as he headed back through the door. “He watches science fiction,” he said to himself, his voice pitched low enough that Dorrek assumed he wasn’t supposed to hear. “Of course he does.”

He emerged holding the cups, this time with a dark liquid inside, steam rising off the top suggesting it was hot. “Coffee?” Bill asked, holding one of the cups out to him. “If it turns out to be a deadly toxin for Skrulls or Kree, please understand it wasn’t intentional.”

“I’ll make a note of that.” Dorrek sniffed the cup carefully, cupping the heated container between his hands. Pungent, earthy, faintly… fruity? It smelled good, anyway, and he took a careful sip. The taste was nothing like the smell, tongue-puckeringly bitter, followed by the faint tingle of his healing working on… something. A mild toxin, if he had to guess, or a stimulant? “You drink this for fun?”

“Not a fan, hunh?” Bill, meanwhile, had gone back and forth to the cooking area again, bringing out bowls, a bottle of something white, and a box. “You get used to it —that or add ridiculous amounts of sugar and cream. And we mostly drink it to stay awake.”

Stimulant, then. Dorrek’s second guess. He tried another sip, wrinkling his nose and setting it aside. “Maybe some other time.”

“It can be an acquired taste,” Bill conceded. He popped open the top of the box and poured small baked rings of some kind of grain into the two bowls. “Breakfast cereal. It’s not exciting, but it probably won’t kill you.”

Dorrek joined him at the table, resting his elbows on it while he watched the process. “Given the night I’ve just had?” he joked, feeling that little rush of victory when he coaxed that smile back on to Bill’s face. “I’m going to consider that a vast improvement.”

* * *

The nice thing about being an astronomer as opposed to, say, a newspaper editor, was that Bill didn’t technically have to be at the lab first thing in the morning. Especially considering he’d been there until he’d seen the ship streak across the sky last night.

The way he’d bolted out of there at top speed was going to raise some questions of its own, but one problem at a time.

And since right now his main problem was out of the room and trying to figure out how to take a shower (hot on the left, cold tap on the right), Bill had a chance to think clearly. While he wasn’t being distracted by biceps the size of his head.

In some respects, he was a simple man.

A simple, lonely, man, without a lot of allies on hand. Not ones he could call on with a secret of this magnitude, anyway. Eli could be trusted, that was one. Cassie was another, though Nate was a wild card at the best of times-

The pipes clanked in the wall, the sound of running water punctuated by an immediate and startled yelp. A wet head appeared from around the corner, water dripping on the linoleum. “It comes out of the _ceiling_.” Dorrek pointed at him, his accusation somewhere between surprise and outrage.

“Technically it comes out of the showerhead, which is close to the ceiling. Where else would the water come from?”

“The walls, ambient mist?” Dorrek blinked at him like it was a ridiculous question, and Bill blinked back with probably pretty close to the same expression on his face. “This planet is strange,” Dorrek grumbled, withdrawing his head and - _do not think about his naked, wet and glistening shoulders._

“Look who’s talking, lizard…mammal… guy.”

The water started up again. Bill should probably have tried harder to explain the soap. He’d just have to hope Dorrek wouldn’t try to eat it.

Okay. So he had some allies, and there were a couple of people he could call on for favours as long as he didn’t have to explain too much. First things first, he had to take Dorrek back to the ship. It shouldn’t be hard to find the impact site again, but then what?

From the velocity of the crash, the ship was going to need some repairs. So go to the lab. They had tools there. Not enough to repair a spaceship, but voltmeters and blowtorches and things used to calibrate and repair the telescopes.

So the ship, then the lab, then back to the ship to do the repairs, then … say goodbye to the greatest discovery of his life.

Bill slumped back in the armchair and frowned at the wall. Dorrek wasn’t a _discovery_ , he was a person. Thinking like that was the kind of thing that would get them both into trouble. And yet. He was the tiniest taste of a much vaster mystery. Life off of Earth. Life from outside the solar system, at that! Forget _Mars_ , the star he came from might not even have a name or a place on the star charts yet.

Maybe, since Bill was helping him, Dorrek would be grateful enough to share some of that knowledge. His ship’s computer had to have a navigation system, after all, and the knowledge stored in just one of those data banks would push human development forward a hundred years or more.

And frankly, given recent history, humanity could use all the help they could get.

The phone rang, the bell jangling, and jolted Bill out of his introspection. He crossed the room and snagged the heavy handset off the receiver on the third ring. The water stopped running, the pipes starting up the tick-tick-tick of contraction between the walls as the metal cooled.

“Bill Kaplan.”

“Billy! How are you? It’s Kate.” The breezy voice on the other end was both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, his brother’s steady girl was also one of Bill’s best friends and had been since college. On the other, she still lived in New York, like Bill’s brother, and the only reason she could possibly be awake at – he checked his watch – seven am local time was if someone had died (unlikely, given her tone of voice) or if she was up to something.

Much more plausible.

“Are you actually alive before eight in the morning on purpose, or have you just not gone to bed yet?” he replied, wary. A blond head reappeared in the hallway door, a concerned look on Dorrek’s face. Bill gestured toward the phone receiver in his hand, which didn’t seem to help.

“Something very interesting came across the wire this morning, and I was wondering if you could give me a scoop.” He could practically hear the grin in her voice, that particular smile that meant trouble. Most of the time he’d be one hundred percent on board for a little bit of chaos, Kate Bishop style. Just not today.

Dorrek frowned at him from the hall, towel wrapped—good God have mercy, only around his narrow waist. Bill’s mouth went dry, his eyes fixed on the taper, the hint of the V of muscle along his hipbones- _he has no body hair._

He wrenched his eyes away.

“What was that noise?” Dorrek asked, and Bill flapped his hand at him in a gesture that he hoped was a universal sign for ‘go away.’

“What could I possibly know to give you a quote about, Kate? The _Tribune_ ’s readership doesn’t have any interest in planets, stars and galaxies.”

“What about spaceships? And did I hear someone else over there?”

He almost missed the question, he was so preoccupied with trying to convince Dorrek —through sign language—that the ringing phone hadn’t been anything dangerous and everything was _fine_ , thank you very much please go put some _clothes_ on.

“Wait, what about spaceships?” Bill froze.

Dorrek, who had made it a few steps into the hall, turned around and brought his stupid bulging biceps back into the living room.

“You haven’t turned on your TV at all this morning, have you? Something crashed in your back yard last night, and one of the local yokels is giving interviews to anyone who’ll listen about the ‘flying saucer.’ You have your telescopes glued to your head all night, and you’re telling me you didn’t see anything?”

“I’m not saying that,” Bill hedged, trying desperately to come up with something—anything!—that would put her off for a moment. “I did see something come down last night, I even went out to take a look.”

Dorrek was staring at him, eyes wide, even as he backpedaled and reached for his clothes. Bill tried to wave him down again, but his hand gestures seemed to be just as useless this time as last.

“So?” There was a faint scuffle at the other end of the line, and he could see her in his mind’s eye, perched on the side of her desk, legs crossed, phone between her shoulder and her ear, notebook firmly in hand.

The window- the window blind was open and Dorrek was standing in full view of the street, naked chest and all. Bill grabbed the body of the phone and tried to make it across the room to close it. The phone cord caught him up short halfway there, almost jerking the receiver out of his hand.

“So, nothing. It was a weather balloon,” he lied, guilt settling in as he did it. He never lied to Kate! But this time it wasn’t his secret to tell. He waved at the window and tried to mime drawing the shade down.

Dorrek looked back and forth between Bill and the window but then he finally caught on and headed for the window.

“A weather balloon.” Kate’s dry response didn’t give him a lot of hope, though. “You’re telling me that a local foreman couldn’t tell the difference between a flying saucer and a weather balloon?”

“To be fair, there’s not a lot to do around here,” Bill replied, embroidering his lie. “And tequila’s one hell of a drink.”

Dorrek pulled the tab on the blind and it came down, shielding the inside of the apartment from view. Bill breathed out a quiet sigh of relief. The spring caught and the blind rolled right back up, flapping as it went.

There was silence for a moment from the other end of the line. “Something’s up, I can hear it in your voice. It’s worth me coming down for this, isn’t it?”

“What? No! Nothing’s up! I’m just tired. From being out all night chasing downed weather balloons. An honest day’s work is never done, and all that.” Bill watched helplessly as Dorrek fought the blind, the up-and-down no doubt attracting more of the landlord’s attention than the naked-man-in-the-window ever would have. “Stop!”

“Stop what? I can hear you panicking from here.”

“I’m not panicking!” he protested, panicking. “Don’t come down, it’ll be a waste of time. And gas! And I know how much you hate those long highway drives.”

Dorrek looked exasperated, mouthed something that Bill couldn’t read, grabbed his uniform and vanished into the bathroom again.

“Drive? What kind of heathen do you take me for?” Kate drawled, amused. “I’ll take one of daddy’s planes and be there by tonight, if there’s a story in it. The paper could use a shake up, and I need another good byline if I’m ever going to move off the goddamned social pages and into the real news.”

Bill put his foot down. “There’s no story.”

“No story?”

“No story.” The guilt twisted a knife in again and he let out a soft sigh. “If I promise to give you an exclusive on something later, will you trust me when I say I can’t tell you anything right now?”

Her voice softened. “You’re not in any kind of trouble, are you?”

Dorrek reappeared in the black and purple unitard he’d been wearing when Bill’d found him, which was only marginally better than the naked. He watched Bill and the phone warily.

Bill glanced across the room, his eyes falling on the rippling muscles of Dorrek’s back as he bent to pull on his boots. _Boy am I ever._ “No. I’m not in any trouble. I’m just asking you to trust me for now.”

“I can do that. But if some kind of trouble did start, you know we’ve got your back. Tommy and I can be there in five hours.”

“Does he know you’re volunteering him?” Bill relaxed incrementally, Kate’s reassurance more of a help than she knew.

“Would it matter if he did? Keep in touch, Billy. Let me know if there’s anything you need from here.”

“I will,” he promised. “I’ll call you later.”

“Long distance is cheapest after eight pm,” she reminded him, a cheerful little dig at the pittance he got paid by the university.

“Then you call me, spend daddy’s money instead.”

“It’d be my sincere pleasure.”

Bill hung up. He turned to put the phone base back on the table and bumped nose-to-chest into a meat wall, Dorrek’s arms firmly folded.

“Who are you telling about me?” Dorrek asked, the warmth from before gone from his voice, and his feet planted. The affable breakfast companion was gone, replaced with the cool face of a challenger.

Bill took a step back and looked up at him, heart momentarily in his throat. “No-one. Not until you’re away from Earth and safe.”

“That’s not what it sounded like.”

“It’s what it is. But if there’s anyone in the world we can trust, it’s Kate and Tom. But if she’s right, and other people saw your ship come down, then this is going to be more difficult than we thought.” Bill put the phone back where it was supposed to go and headed for the table, sliding his arms into his suit jacket sleeves and shoving his wallet and keys into his pockets as he talked. “We may need some help. At the very least, we’re going to have to move fast. If someone’s gone to the Sherriff —or the FBI —then they’re going to be looking for your ship. And for you.”

He stopped and looked Dorrek over again. “And looking like that, you won’t be hard to spot. You’re going to need normal clothes. At least until we can figure out what you’re doing next. And there’s no way my suits are going to fit you.”

Maybe if Bill had been six inches taller and had eighty pounds more muscle on him, but certainly not in this lifetime.

Still remote and distant, his hair damp, Dorrek studied Bill for a moment, not saying anything. He walked in a circle around him, leaving Bill feeling _inspected_ , like a bug under glass. Then Dorrek’s skin shifted, rippling and changing, and his purple bodysuit went with it. That was unsettling, watching colour blur dark down his arms, the surface of his body undulating in front of Bill’s eyes.

When it all stopped, the nausea and awe fighting a battle inside Bill, Dorrek was standing in front of him dressed in an identical copy of Bill’s suit, together with the slightly frayed corner of his pocket welt and the haphazard knot in his tie.

“You’re. Wearing my suit,” Bill pointed a finger at him, unsure as to what he’d just seen. It was like the eye thing all over again, but there wasn’t a nictating membrane in the world that could explain what he’d just seen.

“That’s what you’re wearing,” Dorrek pointed out. “And I’ve seen Earth clothes like this in your broadcasts.”

“But you weren’t wearing a suit before.” Bill dared to close the distance between them, poking at Dorrek’s arm. It had been bare before, now it felt… not quite like wool. It was warmer, softer, more like… skin? “That’s still your arm,” he accused. “Are you naked?”

“Do arms count as naked?” Dorrek asked, and some of that glint of humour was back in his eyes… though really, it could just as easily have been confusion.

Bill took the chance —when would _that_ come again?—and poked Dorrek’s chest with an experimental finger. Holy hell, all of him was solid. “Where did your clothes go?”

“I’m still wearing it. It’s made from unstable molecules. They shift with me.”

“Shift. Like the-” Bill gestured to his own eyes, then to Dorrek’s, which seemed to have settled into a slightly more natural-looking shade of blue. “Eye thing.”

“Like the eye thing.” Okay, he was definitely looking amused again. Bill had to look stupid, asking questions that probably everyone else in the galaxy knew the answers to. It wasn’t his fault he was from a species from an apparently-embargoed planet! They couldn’t expect humans to know anything if they were going to be kept cut off from the wider universe on purpose. “Skrulls are shape-shifters.”

“Of course they are.” Bill threw his hands in the air and turned toward the front door. “Next you’re going to tell me that Santa Claus is a Kree, and the Queen of England came from Mars. On second thought,” he pointed at Dorrek accusingly, “don’t confirm that. I don’t want to know.”

“Mars is a dead world, for the record,” Dorrek replied, following Bill to the door. “It hasn’t had running water on it for millennia.”

Bill sighed. “Make me obsolete, why don’t you.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re not sorry at all.”

“Not really, no.”

“Get out of my apartment. We have a ship to find.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A ship? A ship! But someone else got there first...

Earth’s single yellow sun was well on the rise by the time Bill was driving them back down the long, paved road they’d taken the night before. Dorrek remembered some of the route, but not all. The shock of the crash and his exhaustion had apparently had more of an impact than he’d realized at the time.

Bill turned a dial on the dash and music crackled out of the primitive, tinny-sounding speakers, only to turn to static as he started fiddling with the settings. The sound swooped though a handful of different conversations and brief snatches of music while he searched for something specific. That was alright; it gave Dorrek a chance to take in more of his surroundings than he’d been able to absorb while panicking in the dark.

First impressions weren’t terribly favourable. The vegetation was sparse, the road dusty, buildings few, and the ones that were there were short, squat and heavy. Some rock formations in the distance were interesting, but otherwise the land was flat. The sky felt oddly empty overhead without either of Throneworld’s heavy moons hanging above them, the pale blue stretching on toward a far distant horizon.

Earth _had_ other biospheres; he’d seen images of them. Just his luck to crash in some kind of half-barren scrubland.

“Come on,” Bill muttered, twisting the dial back again, settling on a station and tuning the speaker in clearly. His brow furrowed in concentration as he divided his attention between the road and the radio, his lower lip pressing out in a pout, and Dorrek re-thought. Maybe this was just his luck after all. What were the chances he’d land and find an ally right away, especially one who seemed as drawn-

“Deputy Sheriff George Forgus confirmed the crash at an impromptu press conference this morning,” the radio declared, catching Dorrek’s full attention. “The fireball entering the atmosphere late last night was first believed to be a meteor strike but is now understood to have been a downed craft. Emergency personnel responded, but no further information on the type of craft, or the status of its pilots, has yet to be released. Stay tuned for more, following traffic, the weather, and sports.”

“I suppose it was too much to hope that you were the only one who took notice.” He’d been naïve, or maybe just wishful thinking. Those were failings he couldn’t afford.

“I’m afraid so.” Bill frowned, drumming his fingertips on the wheel. “It’s okay, it’s fine. We don’t need to change plans. I know Forgus, he’s a good guy. Even if he’s still on site, he’ll let us in. We’ll just need to be more careful about your cover story.”

“And what is that going to be?”

He might have gotten an answer, if the radio hadn’t started to flicker between silence and noise as the car slowly coasted to a stop.

Every one of Dorrek’s senses went on high alert. The road was empty, the terrain on both sides the same. If Bill was an enemy he could kill and dispose of Dorrek right there, and no-one would be the wiser.

He should have been more suspicious. He’d been half-stunned the previous night, seduced into relaxation by Bill’s somewhat flustered charm this morning, but the human was still a stranger. And Dorrek, isolated and barely armed, was easy prey.

Some tactical leader he was. What would Kl’rt and the rest of this teachers have to say?

The Skrull way was one of manipulation and deceit. Pull on the threads of people’s needs and desires until your will became theirs. He’d learned those lessons at his grandfather’s side, watched him tug and push at delegates without them ever realizing, changing the course of galactic history to bend his way.

But then at night, at his mother’s knee and his nurse’s, came the refrains that sang to some other piece of his heart. _Be kind, be true. Not every place is like this place. When you are emperor, sweet child, rule with mercy and justice. Seek peace. Be more than what we have been._

The loss still stung, the sharp pain only dulled a little by the decade that had passed since his mother’s death. Her voice lingered and he hesitated, caught between warring impulses. Confront, or dissemble?

No matter what Bill’s intentions were, Dorrek’s behaviour didn’t have to change. It was better if it didn’t.

Bill expected bemused, affable Dorrek by now. If he was honestly trying to be kind, then becoming cold and suspicious would only make the man more reluctant to help him.

And if he was setting Dorrek up for some kind of betrayal—to his own government, to the insurgents, or some other enemy—thinking Dorrek was oblivious would give him the advantage.

Giving himself a kind of permission to relax made it easier, refocusing his attention on the body that didn’t entirely feel like his.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, tension in his voice, only a second having passed since the engine’s stop.

Bill smacked the dashboard and shook his head, getting out of the car. He looked annoyed rather than happy about the situation, but a good agent wouldn’t let his cover slip quite so soon. “This car’s old,” he grumbled, heading around to the front. “She’s falling apart. I’ll have us going again in a minute.”

Dorrek shifted his weight, let his hand drop to rest on the handle of his blaster. If Bill drew a weapon, he’d discover first-hand that the Skrull Crown Prince was much more dangerous than he appeared.

“It’s an intermittent fault,” Bill continued talking, seemingly oblivious, but he reached down to the grill at the front of the car and moved his hand. Dorrek curled his hand around the grip, easing his finger toward the trigger. “I take it in, the garage can’t recreate the problem, they tell me to bring it back when it’s happened again- but how am I supposed to bring it in when it’s broken, if the breaking means the car can’t move?”

Something clicked. The metal cover on the front of the car sprang up and Dorrek moved. He shifted to a small, lithe Sakaar desert cat, diving out of the open window and landing neatly with all six feet on the hard-packed earth.

Bill yelped and ducked down behind the metal shielding.

Dorrek let the shift go and slid back —not into his own skin, but the human shape he’d started this misadventure with. He was glad for the choice a moment later when Bill’s head slowly rose up from behind the metal cover, eyes wide with surprise.

“A little jumpy, are we?” Bill cracked, tension lacing in his voice even as his shoulders settled down from around his ears. “I opened the car hood. I need to fix the engine or we’re not going anywhere fast.”

Dorrek let out a held breath, his fingers leaving the handle of his weapon, tucking it back into the waistband of the Earth-style suit. “You try going through what I have and see how calm _you_ are.”

Disappointment flickered in Bill’s eyes for a moment before it was gone again. He shrugged out of his coat, draping it over the top of the hood, and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt. “I wish I could promise that you can trust me—and have you believe it—but I understand why you can’t.”

 He shouldn’t feel a spark of guilt at Bill’s comment, or a sense of disquiet, as though they were doing something wrong. _First rule of survival. Find a defensive position, identify and locate the enemy._ He was already failing that one, still unsure who, exactly, his enemy really was.

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate what you’re doing for me,” Dorrek said after a moment, crossing the couple of steps back toward the car. Bill had some kind of metal wrench out and was busy doing something that looked complicated to the inside of his engine. “You don’t want to get mixed up in my mess.”

“I’m pretty sure I already am.” Bill propped his hands on either side of the open engine space, the gesture that accompanied his rueful smile making the muscles in his forearms pop. Dorrek hadn’t noticed it before, not with all those clothes on, but his arms had solid strength to them, his hands broad and obviously capable.

His pulse quickened, the treacherous thing, and he resolved to ignore it. Bill was generous to a fault, quick-witted, kind, attractive, and _human_. A species who, as far as Dorrek had ever seen, were innately heterosexual and dedicated to their binary.

It was beyond pointless, it was a waste of time and energy he needed for other things. Like getting off the planet.

“There’s something wrong with the engine?” Dorrek asked instead, moving to the front of the vehicle to look down inside. A moment of devilish humour poked him as his guard came down again. “Can’t you just turn on the backup antigrav?” he asked, all innocence.

“No, I can’t ‘just turn on the backup-” Bill met his eyes, and Dorrek widened them just a smidge further. “Go sit in the car,” Bill ordered, pointing and biting back a laugh. Dorrek didn’t move, watching the process instead, his gaze drifting between the intricate —albeit ancient-looking—machinery, and Bill’s sleek forearms.

“’Turn on the backup antigrav’” Bill repeated in a mocking mutter, shaking his head as he bent back to his task. “I bet you guys don’t even have anti-gravity tech, you’ve just decided it’s fun to screw with the primitive monkey species.” 

“You laughed, didn’t you?” Dorrek grinned, not taking offense.

“That’s because I’m an idiot,” Bill sighed. He looked up at Dorrek, flushed faintly red for no real reason Dorrek could name, and wiped black oil off his hands onto a dingy rag that he appeared to keep with the car for that purpose. “The belt’s back on, we should be good to go. I’ll start her up. You stay here and watch and make sure nothing slips when I turn the key.”

Dorrek stood, as requested, but he watched Bill rather than the engine block. “You’re not just a scientist.” He observed idly, as Bill slid in to the driver’s seat.

“Why, because I can do minor car repairs?” Bill did something inside the car and the engine sputtered. Pieces inside started turning, a gear caught, and the whole thing roared to life again. “Scientists get our hands dirty too.”

Dorrek eyeballed the hood, and the spire of steel holding it upright. He took a chance, poked it out of its clasp, and let the hood drop to a closed position again. “Not like that they don’t.”

“Maybe not in space, with your fancy spaceships and anti-gravity machines,” Bill had gotten halfway out of the car already, but stopped when Dorrek had done the work for him. He grinned and sat back in his seat, waiting for Dorrek to rejoin him. “But down here we have to improvise.”

Dorrek sat, closed the door behind him. Earth technology was still strange, but pieces of it were slowly starting to become familiar. Familiar- _ish._ “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“And we’re moving,” Bill said, repositioning the lever next to his thigh and pulling the car back onto the road. “Next stop, landing site.”

* * *

Another half an hour—not nearly as long as the drive had felt the night before—and they were approaching the field where Dorrek’s ship had gone down. Bill chanced a glance at the man (the alien) sitting next to him. Dorrek didn’t seem to notice, his attention focused on the scrubland and fields passing by outside the open car window.

Jumpy. That was one word for it. And that ray gun had come out awfully fast.

It had been easy to forget in the morning light, but the fear that had gripped Bill last night was probably a lot more justified than not.

Changing his eyes was one thing. The wild-cat thing with the fangs and the too-many-legs was a whole different ball game. A reminder that no matter how human he looked, he was still Something Else. And probably a very dangerous Something Else to boot.

They reached the bend in the road, and Bill nodded toward it. “We’re not far now,” he said, after clearing his throat. “The place I went off the road is just ahead.”

“And so are they,” Dorrek pointed out as they rounded the curve. The shoulder of the road was full of cars, a good half-dozen of them: the town’s two police cars, a mud-covered pickup truck from one of the local farms, a military jeep and a couple of fancy black sedans that Bill didn’t recognize at all.

Dorrek sat up straight, and Bill didn’t miss the way his hand moved toward his hidden ray gun.

“I think it’ll be fine,” Bill glanced pointedly at Dorrek’s back and shook his head. “We’ll go find out what’s going on. But keep the science-fiction stuff under wraps. The absolute last thing we want to deal with is questions. Like who are you, and why do you have a disintegrator gun, and is Mars declaring war on Earth. The usual.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Dorrek’s reply was dry, and when Bill got out of the car and slammed the door closed, he followed.

Dorrek’s ship had cut a long trench into the ground when it first hit, and now in the light Bill could see the charred sides, the glassy sheen of molten rock from the incredible heat of atmospheric entry. The ship must have had a surface temperature higher than three thousand degrees when it hit in order to fuse the ground—

Bill shook off the immediate impulse to grab a pen and start to work out some of the science involved. Theoretically, he could just turn around and ask.

Not here, though. And not now. The cars parked on the verge weren’t just there for decoration. A couple of guys in suits and dark sunglasses were walking around with notebooks and a camera, an older man in an army uniform was over by the other end by the trees, and – yep, the sheriff’s department, representing.

It wasn’t Deputy Forgus supervising the bustle of activity down at the crash site, but at least the deputy was one Bill knew. That was the good part. The bad part was that he was in conversation with one of the dark-suited agents. Bill backed up a step, but not before George turned and saw him, raising a hand in greeting.

Dammit. There was no way to back away smoothly now.

Bill raised a hand as he picked his way down the dusty hillside, remembering how he’d skidded desperately down it less than twelve hours before. “George! You’ve got quite the mess here.”

That was good —keep it casual, keep it easy. _Just passing through, mind if I take a look? Ooh, a spaceship, what a surprise…_

“Well now, good morning Dr. Kaplan.” George nodded congenially, lifting his broad-brimmed hat to scratch at his thinning, grey-streaked hair. The sour-face man beside him looked Bill up and down and said nothing, arms folded across his chest. He had sunglasses on the end of his nose and stared Bill down over top of the rims, a look that made Bill feel like he was a schoolkid again, called on the carpet by the principal. “You’re out pretty early. I don’t normally see you folks from the observatory up and around until mid-morning. Nice work if you can get it, I say.”

“That’s what happens when we’re up all night with the telescopes,” Bill forced himself into the usual back and forth, hyper-aware of the urgency he didn’t dare show and Dorrek’s solid and faintly threatening presence somewhere behind. “Tell you what, I’ll take your morning shift holding up the counter at Mabel’s, and you take the midnight-to-six tracking constellation drift.”  

George chuckled, shaking his head. “No thank you, I’ll pass on that kind offer.” His gaze flickered over to the man in the suit standing impassively beside him, then to the trench, and then back to Bill, his expression sobering. “I suppose I don’t have to ask what brings you down here this morning, Doc.”

The man in the suit’s expression changed from ‘ticked off principal’ to ‘intrigued bug collector,’ his gaze going up and over Bill’s shoulder, and Bill heard footsteps moving quietly behind him. “Dr. Bill Kaplan, from the college observatory?” he asked, speaking for the first time, his voice rough around the edges like a habitual smoker’s. “And I don’t believe I got your name, son.”

Ahhh, crap. So much for ignoring the issue and hoping the other men would do the same. “Sorry about that,” Bill replied breezily, turning to gesture to Dorrek. He made eye contact, tried to beam _let me do the talking_ into the man’s head through brute willpower alone. “This is- Dorrek.”

That was a terrible first name. No-one had a name like ‘Dorrek.’

Bill’s eyes fell on the cars pulled up at the top of the ridge, and—sure, why not. One of the jumbles of letters and numbers on the license plates read _2T3D5_.

“Ted Dorrek,” Bill improvised, smiling brightly. “He’s a student in from California. I brought him along to take some notes on that meteor that went down last night. Dorrek, Deputy George Spalding. He keeps the peace ‘round these parts. I don’t know this gentleman’s name-” he left that hanging, an obvious invitation for the agent to supply the missing information.

He didn’t.  

“Mr. Dorrek, good to meet you.” George seemed to be buying it, reaching over in an offer to shake Dorrek’s hand. Please let him get it, please-

Dorrek only hesitated for a beat before taking the deputy’s hand and giving it what looked like a firm shake. George winced a little when he pulled his hand away, shaking his fingers out.

“Likewise,” Dorrek replied, his expression bland. A mask, hiding his thoughts.

“There some new dress code at the observatory? Those matching suits and ties make you look like a pair of missionaries,” George joked. The agent didn’t laugh.

Bill snuck a quick glance at Dorrek, hopefully unnoticed—damn. He hadn’t changed the suit, even after Bill had called him on it at the apartment. Even their ties still matched, the floral-sprigged blue silk that Bill’s mother had given him for his birthday.

“You’re looking a bit old to be a college boy, Mr. Dorrek.” The agent gave Dorrek a long once-over, his hands sliding into his trouser pockets.  

“He just got back,” Bill jumped in hurriedly. “From overseas.” The agent kept on staring at Dorrek, like he knew something, or suspected something. But how was that possible? Why couldn’t they just let Bill go and get to the ship? What could they possibly have to be suspicious about? … other than the truth, of course. But the lie wasn’t even a bad one!

“I’m a pilot,” Dorrek added sunnily, that uncertain mask fading away. “Or I was, until recently.”

George relaxed, nodding. “Ayup, that makes sense, Agent Boyne. My nephew’s still in the Navy. He’s thinking about re-upping, ‘specially now that the war’s over, but lots of fellows are heading back to school.”  

Bill hesitated, torn between the need to stay and run interference in case Dorrek said anything truly weird, and his desperate itch to get to the ship and figure out what needed to be done. Before Boyne started asking more questions.  

“I hate to interrupt, but I’m going to need Ted here to give me a hand.” Bill nodded toward the treeline, and the ship hidden behind it. “That meteor gave one hell of a lightshow last night, it’s got to be a fantastic specimen.”

“We can’t let you do that, Dr. Kaplan.” Boyne shook his head, and Bill’s stomach sank. “This area is restricted to government personnel.”

“Come on,” Bill pleaded his case. “How often do I get a chance to get data like this? A meteor in our own back yard. Give me five minutes to take some measurements, maybe a couple of photos. We’ll stay out of the way.”

“You’re going to need to leave now, Doctor. Let’s not have any unnecessary trouble.”

Bill turned to George, eyes wide. Maybe he’d give in, if Bill tried charm.

“Sorry Doc, but I’ve got my orders.” George nodded at the suit-guys in the trench, one of whom was now talking to Army-guy. No, both of them now looking over now, and watching the conversation taking place on the hilltop. The suit guy started to pick his way across the trench, coming in their direction. “Agent Boyne here says that the site’s all radioactive. I’m gonna have to ask you and Mr. Dorrek to leave.”

“That’s not going to work,” Dorrek insisted. “We can’t just leave without what we came for.” His hand started drifting back toward his waistband and the ray gun hidden there.

“Those ‘measurements’?” Boyne asked, the unspoken quotes hanging in the air. Yeah, no, he definitely wasn’t buying what Bill was trying to sell.

“I’ll walk Dr. Kaplan and Mr. Dorrek back to their car, Agent Boyne. Make sure they get on their way,” George offered. Bill was about to protest, winding up for a pointed rant about the sanctity of science and the observatory’s right to have access to space finds, but then George cocked his head, gesturing for Bill and Dorrek to follow him up the hill.

“Make sure they do,” Boyne replied, steely grey eyes fixed on Bill and Dorrek, like he was studying them. Memorizing them. A chill settle low in Bill’s spine.

Bill put his hand on Dorrek’s forearm, squeezing it. “Come on,” he said quietly, letting go of his pseudo-righteous outrage. “We can come back later, once it’s safe. There’s no sense putting ourselves in danger of radiation poisoning.”

“Come on, Doc.” George coughed pointedly. “Time to mosey.”  

“We can’t leave,” Dorrek protested, toe to toe with Bill.

“Do what the nice Deputy says.” Dorrek glared at him but Bill held firm, glaring right back. “Trust me,” he muttered through gritted teeth. After what felt like ages Dorrek relented, stepping out of Bill’s way and letting him go past.

The men down in the trench watched them go. “Careful, boys—radiation poisoning’s an awful way to die.” Bill called out and gave a jaunty wave, unable to resist.

Dorrek held his tongue until they got up to the top again, out of earshot of the men in the trench. “What’s going on down there? Why can’t we see the s- the _meteor_?”

George shook his head at them, taking off his hat and scratching at his scalp again. He didn’t speak freely until they were on the other side of Bill’s car, blocked from the view of the trench.

“It’s the damnedest thing, Doc. I tell you, I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, right before those FBI agents showed up.”

“Tell me,” Bill urged.

“Whatever it was that fell last night? That was no meteor. You heard Forgus on the radio this morning?”

Bill nodded.

“He wasn’t crazy. I saw that thing—it was maybe twelve, fifteen feet around, perfectly smooth, and it had a door or a hatch or something like that. No meteor I’ve ever heard tell of ever had a hatch, if you get what I’m saying.”

“If it wasn’t a meteor, then what was it?” Dorrek asked, looking for all the world like he was deeply skeptical.

George snorted. “You tell me, son. You two are the scientists.” He glanced down the hill again, then back. “Army came down with a huge truck and took it away, maybe two hours ago. Said it was a ‘weather balloon.’ Like I was born yesterday.”

Bill gave a low, shocked whistle, shaking his head. “No kidding. Where did they say they were taking it?”

“They didn’t say, but the truck had Texas plates.” He glanced down the road and shook his head. “I don’t think you’re going to catch them now, Doc, even if they’d let you take a look at this thing. That convoy’ll be almost halfway to Dallas by now.” 

Dorrek said something under his breath that Bill didn’t catch. It might not have been English, but the tone was definitely rude.

“Thanks, George. I’ll give the observatory in Denton a call and see if they know anything.” Bill clapped the deputy on the shoulder, as though the news was merely interesting and not a Massive Goddamn Problem.

“Do you know if they took everything?” Dorrek asked, not letting it go. “The entire ship?”

George looked down the hill again, then back at them, settling his broad-brimmed hat back on his head. “They’ve had people down there looking for more pieces of it ever since, but I haven’t seen anything coming back. Tell you what, Doc, if they come up with some little green men, I’ll give the observatory a call straight away.” He chuckled, though it sounded more hollow than amused.

“I’m going to hold you to that,” Bill promised, pointing at him, then grabbing Dorrek’s arm to steer him toward the car before he did or said anything stupid. “Come on, Ted. Let’s go back to the lab.”

Dorrek pulled his arm away but followed, his face a thundercloud. “Why are we leaving?” he insisted once George had left them to head back to his post, and Bill was opening the car door. “There could be something down there I need.”

“You heard him, the authorities have the site under lockdown, and they’re not just going to let us waltz in and pick up pieces of a ship from another planet!” Bill shook his head. “Best scenario, they throw us in jail for trespassing. Worst case scenario? We get shot. And all of this running around will have been for nothing, because then your bad guys win.” He let out a lungful of air in a long, low sigh, reformulating his plan as he deflated.

“Maybe we can get back tonight once they’re gone, or maybe someone in Texas has seen the convoy on the road. Either way, if we want to get your ship back, we’re going to need to get creative.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Deputy Charles Forgus was a real person, which is why he has a fictional sub in his place in this chapter. The Roswell incident really did involve the Army showing up and carting everything away, though timelines here have been deeply fudged. The Army actually showed up days later, after a rancher had gathered up the crash debris -- that would have thrown a wrench in some plans, so out the window with reality! 
> 
> Basically this thing sticks to the Roswell reports only in so much as they're useful to me. So it goes.


	5. Chapter 5

Dorrek spent most of the drive to Bill’s observatory alternating between fretting and asking increasingly frustrated questions. ‘Agent Boyne' turned out to be a member of an elite law enforcement unit, whose access to resources intimidated Bill. ‘Texas’ was a region to the east, accessible by car travel. ‘Ted’ was apparently a reasonable pseudonym that would help him blend in, and despite sounding so confident in front of the Deputy, Bill had no concrete suggestions for recovering Dorrek’s lost vessel. Suggestions like ‘drive fast enough to get in front of them and simply take it’ didn’t go over well.

At times like this he tried to settle back into himself, find his center, and ask. ‘What would Kl’rt do’?

He wouldn’t have gotten mixed up in any of this in the first place, that was what. And he certainly wouldn’t be letting his brand new ally be doing all of the planning and strategizing.

Even though Earth technology was still so far behind everyone else’s, Dorrek had still expected something more impressive than the squat, beige building with the sign out front. If this was an observatory, where was all their deep-space monitoring equipment?

“We’re here,” Bill said, getting out of the car. “I’ll make some phone calls first and see if I can find out where the Army is taking your ship. And change your tie. Having the same one looks too suspicious.” Dorrek looked down at the strip of fabric tied around his neck, identical to the one around Bill’s. Fine. If blue with botanical imagery looked too similar, he could do... What? Basic grey. The tie changed colour and Dorrek fumbled with the missing door handle. After a moment he gave up, reached out the window and opened his door from the outside, and joined Bill on the stone walkway leading to the double front doors.

“What should I expect when we enter?” Dorrek looked the building over, resignation starting to settle in. If Bill couldn’t help him after all, then he’d have to go off on his own. Tonight, once Bill was asleep. He’d watched the man drive, he could figure out how to make the car go. Then it would only be a matter of heading east.

“Just act natural,” Bill replied breezily, his long strides taking him toward the door. Dorrek hurried along to catch up. “May as well stick with the same cover story. You’re a graduate student at Berkeley, in… what do you know lots about?” he asked, meeting Dorrek’s eyes for the first time since they’d discovered the ship had been taken.

Concern nestled deep in his dark brown eyes, concern and maybe even some guilt, and Dorrek’s irritation faded.

“Galactic politics,” Dorrek supplied, not very helpfully. “Fleet tactics. I’m undefeated at virticrosse-”

Bill gave him a confused look.

“It’s a game, a sport, really – three balls, a ring and an electrified guywire-” Dorrek shook his head. “Never mind. I’ve taken all the stellar navigation courses and I can read star charts, if that helps.”

“It does. So your research project is…” Bill paused in thought, one hand on the door handle. “Radio astronomy,” he declared aloud. “That’s a big deal right now, all kinds of new research happening. Stellar objects generate radio waves,” he started to explain. But Dorrek nodded and cut him off, his impatience rising again.

“Of course they do. How else would you track galactic nuclei and pulsar cycling?”

“Track galactic… yes, good,” Bill clapped him on the shoulder, shaking his head. Amusement, amazement, or something else? “Keep doing that and we can pull this off, no problem. Nate will barely notice us.” He pushed the door open and headed in. “Especially if he’s knee-deep in equations again. Cassie will-”

“What will Cassie do?” The echo of their footsteps in the empty, antiseptic-white hallway was interrupted by the addition of a friendly-sounding voice. A blonde girl joined them, hair pulled back and tied up off her neck, her dress broad in the shoulders and falling to below her knees, belted with a narrow band at the waist.

“Cassie will meet us in the office, I was going to say,” Bill replied, switching conversational tracks with a skill Dorrek almost envied. “Miss Cassandra Lang, Ted Dorrek. He’s a grad student who’s going to be working with me for the next couple of days. Dorrek, Cassie Lang. Her father runs this lab.”

“Pleased to meet you.” She held out her hand and Dorrek took it, remembering to shake it less firmly than he’d done to the Deputy. It was difficult to remember just how fragile humans were. Still, she shook his back with a firm grip, her unabashed scrutiny strongly suggesting that he was the one under evaluation. 

“Likewise,” Dorrek offered. “Do you work here as well?”

“Only always,” she sighed, rolling her eyes. “Bill, Dr. Banner called – he wants a call back. Eli at the library says the book you ordered is in, and you need to talk to Nate for me about getting more lab hours instead of riding the reception desk.”

Bill frowned at her. “Why me? Why can’t you just ask him?”

“Because,” Cassie groaned. “He listens to you. I just get a pat on the head and a question about whether the coffee in the pot is fresh, when he even notices I’m talking. I’m never going to get my thesis done if I can’t get telescope time, and I’ll never _get_ the time if he keeps giving random _boys_ priority on the equipment!” She cut her glance towards Dorrek and grimaced. “No offence.”

“None taken. Why would males automatically get priority?” He did ask them both, a moment of confusion blinding him to how awkward the question might make him look. _Humans place a great deal of importance on sexual dimorphism._ The limited knowledge he did have about the planet included that, at least. _Come on, Dorrek. Keep it together._

“Exactly the question _I_ want to have answered,” Cassie replied, her stack of files tucked under her arm. “Thank you. I like him,” she said to Bill, pushed open the metal double door that they’d come to, and headed inside.

“It’s not that males have _priority_ , it’s that Cassie’s-” Bill trailed off, looking distinctly uncomfortable. “Girls don’t tend to go into science, that’s all. Cassie’s something of a rarity, and that’s because her father’s trained her since she was little.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Dorrek paused in the doorway, keeping his voice low. “Why would half your population self-select out of certain study areas?”

“It’s the way it’s always been. Women stay home after they get married and have… babies. And cook. And things.” Bill was definitely looking out of sorts, and put on the spot. Dorrek didn’t feel all that sorry. “The war changed some of that, but if men gave birth, we’d be the ones staying home. That’s just how it goes,” he added looking into the room beyond, his voice more pensive now than defensive.  

Dorrek shook his head. “Mammals are so strange,” he muttered under his breath, and followed Cassie’s path into the room beyond.

There was more equipment here, more like what he’d expect out of a scientific research facility, even if it was all insanely primitive. He couldn’t spot any computers at all, save for a large box sitting on one of the desks—and that had a _hand-crank_ , of all things, that appeared to be attached to a set of spinning gears with numerals on them. A calculating device?

Another slim, dark-haired man about Bill’s age bent over a series of charts spread out on a table, alternating between making notes on the charts and fiddling with a measured rod with a slider on it. Humans were a stone-age species, making it through the atmosphere on sheer brute force, calculated with sticks and string. Dorrek wasn't sure whether he was impressed, appalled, or both. 

The third man looked up when Bill and Dorrek entered and straightened right away, his eyes alight. “Bill! It’s about time you got here. That object from last night, the trajectory’s perfect. Look at this-” he tapped the charts on the table. This had to be Cassie’s ‘Nate.’ Bill headed over and Dorrek followed, curious.

“Based on the arc, speed and entry angle, it came from behind the moon. Behind it! That’s no meteor trajectory.” Nate gestured, pen in his hand. “We have to find the landing site. This is big, Billy. This could be the discovery that makes our names. I called Banner, we’re going to pull a few of the post-docs and undergrads to get a recovery crew together.”

“It’s not what you think, and it’s too late anyway,” Dorrek replied, before catching himself. He was supposed to be staying unobtrusive and unnoticed.

He wasn’t very good at that.

Nate looked at him, then at Bill, then back at him. “And you are?”

“Ted Dorrek,” Bill interrupted, a half-step in front of Dorrek like he could be a wall between the men. “He’s a student up from Berkeley to shadow me for a few days. Dorrek, Dr. Nate Richards.”

Right. The cover story. “My project is on radio astronomy,” Dorrek helpfully supplied the rest of his lines. “Stellar objects generate radio waves.”

Nate frowned at him. “No-one told me about a student coming in.”

Bill shook his head. “I absolutely did,” he lied. “Last week. It’s not my fault that you weren’t paying attention.”

Nate frowned at Dorrek again, looking him over, and Dorrek tensed. Then Nate turned away and Dorrek relaxed, trying not to let out the relieved breath quite so obviously. “Get it to me in writing next time, will you? Then I can have Cassie make up the security credentials beforehand.”

“I’m a scientist here too, you know,” Cassie voice floated over from a smaller desk in the corner, the top surface covered with books and papers. “Not your secretary.”

“That’s because we don’t have the budget for a secretary,” Nate confided in Dorrek. “But Cassie does an excellent job.”

Dorrek was pretty sure neither of the human men could hear it, but he picked up a distinct mutter from Cassie’s corner. Something very much along the lines of “one day, Nate Richards, I am going to kick your behind…”

He grinned at her, and she, surprised, coloured across the tops of her cheeks and returned his smile with a sheepish one of her own.

“Anyway, what do you mean it’s ‘too late’?”

“I ran by the crash site last night, but it was too dark to do anything,” Bill explained, looking uncomfortable with his massaging of the truth. “I brought Dorrek over this morning to see what we could find in the daylight, but the place was overrun. Looks like the army lost a weather balloon. They’d already picked it up by the time we got there.”

Nate looked at him and shook his head. “And you believed that? Not with what our instrumentation picked up. Weather balloons don’t start from above the toposphere, and they sure as hell don’t make that kind of re-entry trail.” He braced his hands on the table, his grin making his sharp, intense features look almost manic. “That was no weather balloon, and it sure as hell wasn’t a meteor. That was a ship, and the flight path shows intelligent movement.”

“Not that intelligent,” Dorrek muttered to himself. He slid back half a step, putting more space between himself and Nate.

“We find this thing, and whoever was piloting it? You and I will go down in the history books. Nobel prizes. Funding and grants for the rest of our lives.” Nate clapped Bill on the shoulder, while Bill’s back got stiffer and stiffer, his smile more and more forced. “Our names are going to be on the greatest scientific discovery of all time.”

Bill smiled faintly, side-stepping out from under Nate’s hand. “Tell you what,” he offered, “why don’t I get started on tracking it down. I’ll get Dorrek here to make some calls, see if we can find out where that convoy went.”

“Yes. Do that.” Nate nodded, before getting distracted by his charts. “Let me know what you find out.”

Bill stepped away, gesturing for Dorrek to follow. He headed for a set of stairs in the corner of the room—narrow, barely any room to pass, easily defensible—quickly climbing them up four flights.

The room they emerged into was round, three vast telescopes pointing out of the domed ceiling in different directions. A desk sat on the far side of the room, the surface cluttered with small pieces of equipment and one of the Earth communication devices like at Bill’s apartment.

Bill let out a breath and dropped to sit on the top step, his fingers steepled and pressed against his lips. “Damn,” he said after a moment. “I was hoping- never mind. The most important thing is keeping Nate off the scent while we figure this out.”

Dorrek sat down next to him, not thinking about the cramped quarters on the narrow stair. His thigh pressed up against Bill’s in what he hoped was reassuring contact, though the way Bill coloured and shifted in his seat suggested he might have overstepped. He stood again instead, hand on the stair rail.

“And if he does suspect something, I can always become someone else for a little while. Deputy Spalding, maybe.” Dorrek shifted, creating the hat, the facial hair, the swagger- “I say, son. Y’all don’t seem to be from around here.”

Bill burst out laughing, and Dorrek felt something warm curl up inside at the sound. He was light years away from home, but in that moment it didn’t feel quite so far away.

He shifted back to his current disguise, calm settling in. “The most important thing,” he corrected Bill’s statement, “is not to lose sight of the goal. I need to get in contact with someone on Throneworld and find a way to get off this planet. We can work around everything else.”

He got a nod for that, and Bill rose to his feet. “I promised I’d help, and I will. I’ll make some phone calls. And while I do that-” he grinned. “Maybe you can help me with some of my current projects, Mr. ‘I know how to read star charts.’”

“That sounds like a fair trade.” Dorrek smiled, though the something warm had turned into a twisting discomfort at his own reminders.

_Home. That has to be the first thing on my mind, always. Home and warning grandfather that we’re in danger._

Why was it that Bill’s company was starting to make that easier to forget?

* * *

Trying to keep Dorrek under wraps at the observatory had been hard enough; Bill left him at home that evening for the grocery run. Dorrek was good at playing human—a little too good, sometimes—but Bill needed half an hour without his heart in his throat, jumping every time it felt like someone was going to figure something out. Having to come up with excuses to get Dorrek out of the room every time Nate started on about finding the ship and taking it apart had been bad enough. Getting caught explaining what Spam was and why humans thought it was edible was too much right now.

Full grocery basket under his arm, Bill headed for the counter. If fortune was on his side then Mr. Wallace would be working the cash instead of Mrs.-

No such luck.

“Doctor Kaplan! How nice to see you.”

The bespectacled, grey-haired matron smiled when he approached, dimples popping up in her apple-round cheeks. “Evening, Mrs. Wallace,” Bill smiled back, inwardly bracing for it as he began to unload his purchases for her to ring in. He slid a copy of the evening paper off the stack next to the cash and added it to his pile.

She took her time, squinting at the list of prices propped next to her cash register, even though he knew full well that she had every single thing in the store memorized. “What a lovely evening it is to be out and about,” she proclaimed, so cheerfully and sweetly that even Bill’s itch to get out of there dulled against the charm onslaught.

“That it is.”

“Ooh, look at all this. You’re stocking the fridge more than usual.” She lifted up the wrapped package of steaks from the butcher’s counter and gave him an appraising look over the round rims of her glasses. “Going fancy tonight, Doctor? Wining and dining someone, perhaps?”

_Yes. I’m trying to impress a royal dignitary. No, not from anywhere you’d know._

Outwardly, Billy just shook his head. “No such luck,” he replied, trying to match her cheery tone. “I’ve got a … colleague staying over for a few days.” Better try and keep his stories straight. What one person knew in this town, everyone else knew within minutes. Seconds, if Mrs. Lally at the phone exchange got involved.

“Oh yes, the student.” Mrs. Wallace nodded, her register’s keys clacking together as she typed in the price. “Your Miss Lang ran into my Stewart at the post office and mentioned there was someone new up there with all your telescopes. I thought it might be one of those FBI men.”

“No, definitely not,” Bill shook his head. “He’s a PhD candidate up from Berkeley for a few days, that’s all. FBI men?” he played dumb, his heart already picking up the pace. He glanced outside automatically, but no suited strangers patrolled the streets.

“They showed up in these fancy black cars early this morning, went out to the Foster ranch. Casey saw them when he got up to do his milk rounds. You’ve heard what they’re saying on the radio, of course.”

Was that Agent Boyne leaving the diner across the street? The window was cluttered with flyers that blocked his view and the angle was bad, but the suit and hat looked about right. “A spaceship, wasn’t it?” he replied, distracted.

“That’s right. Now I said to Alice, I said that if anything like that had happened, you all up the observatory would have seen it with your fancy machines and radars and so on.”

The agent across the street seemed to feel eyes on him, and he turned. Bill looked away before he got caught staring. “Yes, yes we would have. The last I heard, it was nothing more than a weather balloon.”

“See, there you go,” she said triumphantly, slowly making her way through the rest of the groceries, nestling each item carefully in a paper bag nest. Cheese, butter, vegetables —a half-dozen kinds, and the same for fruit, since who the heck knew what Skrulls could safely eat, other than breakfast cereal? Not Bill.

“A simple answer that doesn’t involve any of that outer space hooey. I told Casey he needs to stop watching so many of those movies. You know how they get ideas into his head. After all, what would a spaceship be looking for around _here_ , of all places?”

Was that shadow moving in his peripheral vision Agent Boyne crossing the street towards the store? What did he know? Had he learned something new and damning since their run-in that morning? 

“A crash wouldn’t mean they intended to land here at all- that is, I couldn’t even begin to guess,” Bill course-corrected, hauling his attention back to the conversation and praying for a quick exit. Or better yet, the ability to translocate instantly from one place to another to avoid the apparently incoming confrontation. “I’m afraid I need to get going. What’s the total, please?”

“That’s a total of nine dollars and forty-seven cents,” she said, slowly finishing up the bagging. “Prices just keep going up, you know, since the end of the war. It’s highway robbery trying to get fresh fruits in, never mind enough eggs to keep everyone in breakfasts. Wheat and corn just keep going up, up up. We have to sell them five pounds bags of flour for _fifty cents_ now just to break even, if you can believe that.”

Bill paid, wincing inwardly as she counted back the piddly amount of change, and nodded as he scrambled to get the bags in his arms. “It’s fine, I know it’s not your fault. Thank you and good night!”

The sun was setting as he made his escape back to his car, arms full of bags. There was no sign of Boyne outside, no-one in the parking lot at all.

Tension bled out of Bill’s shoulders as he fumbled with the keys and got the car door open, exhaustion starting to catch up with him. An alarm sounded somewhere in the distance and he flinched, but it didn’t turn into a fire truck or an ambulance’s wail. He forced his shoulders to unknot as he unloaded the paper bags into the back seat.

Dorrek’d promised to stay in the apartment and not touch anything electric, but what if he’d tried to turn on the oven? Someone who didn’t know about gas stoves or pilot lights could cause a fire just by messing around-

“Doctor Kaplan.”

Bill yelped and bolted upright, his head smacking into the door frame. Pain flashed bright across the top of his head and he groaned, clamping his hand over the sore spot as he whipped around. “What?” he snapped. Stupid, stupid-

Boyne stood there, hands in his pockets. Bill actively felt the blood drain from his face and his stomach do somersaults. His head didn’t feel wet, the pain ebbing slightly, and he dropped his hand back down to his side. “Agent… Boyne, isn’t it?” he asked, and thank God his voice didn’t shake. “What can I do for you?”

_Say ‘never mind’ and go away. How about that?_

“How are you this evening, Doctor? Taking a break from your… meteor research?”

The agent looked a lot more benign in the evening light, at least at first, less official without the sunglasses to hide his eyes. But that was before those steel-grey eyes fixed on Bill and seemed to pierce through every excuse Bill could come up with.

All Bill had to do was keep it casual, and he could get away. As long as his face didn’t start sweating as much as his hands were. “Everybody’s got to eat,” he offered with a grin that probably looked as fake as it felt. “What brings you out tonight? Not enough bad coffee at the motel?”

“Enough to get by,” Boyne replied, his thin lips not twitching with anything resembling humour. “Your friend’s not with you tonight?”

“He’s back at the apartment. Working on his dissertation. The graduate student life,” Bill offered with a game shrug.

Boyne made a noncommittal noise. “How well do you know him? The name’s a funny one, isn’t it? Not American.” One grey eyebrow lifted. “It’s not German, is it?”

“Oh yeah,” Bill scoffed, relief hitting him in a wave. The FBI were barking up the wrong tree, the same thoughts he’d had at the beginning. “Because that’s the first thing a Jewish guy does is welcome a German spy into his home. That kind of thinking why they pay you the big bucks, Agent?”

“I did some checking, Dr. Kaplan. Your Mr. Dorrek, ‘former pilot,’ doesn’t show up in the Air Force’s records. In fact, no-one by that surname does.”

Bill’s insides froze.

Boyne took a step closer, craned his neck. He looked over Bill’s shoulder, trying to see into the back seat? The groceries?

“I wouldn’t know anything about military records, though if they’re anything like the university I’m not surprised they can’t find a damned thing.” Bill stepped sideways a half-step to block his view.

“You don’t find any of this the least bit curious?”

“I worked on the rocket program during the war. I was in a lab most of the time, never met any of the pilots.”

The sun was setting, the parking lot dimming as the twilight settled heavy around them. Boyne’s hat cast his face into shadow, only his eyes still clear—and fixed intently on Bill. “He’s staying with you. You haven’t noticed anything … off about him? Strange habits? Does he ask questions he should know the answers to?”

Bill forced a laugh. “He’s a graduate student. Dumb questions about things he should already know come with the territory.”

Tick, tick tick- the watch on Bill’s wrist counted the seconds, every faint beat marking a moment too long to stay stuck in this conversation. There had to be a way out.

“Are you always this funny, Doctor?”

“I don’t see you laughing.”

“I don’t laugh when I’m on the job.”

 “Why am I not surprised? This has been fun and all, but I have to get home before the _student I am supervising_ manages to break the observatory’s adding machine.” He stepped back and fumbled for the handle to the driver’s side door. "It’s been a slice, Agent. Let’s do it again... never."

It opened and Boyne didn’t stop him. He just stood there, watching, as Bill slid into his seat and slammed the door closed.

He did move after that, taking three long strides toward the car and leaning in Bill’s open window. “One last thing, Doctor.” His voice was smooth as silk, knowing. His gaze dropped to Bill’s hands on the steering wheel, the nails bitten down to the quick and knuckles still scraped from his frantic work to free Dorrek from the crash. “Do you own a camera?”

“Yeah, I-”

_Scrambling down into the trench, getting tangled in the strap, chucking it aside so he could dig-_

The worn leather strap that had his _initials_ monogrammed on it, a birthday gift from his parents years ago.

“I lost it,” Bill lied, holding eye contact. “Haven’t seen it in months. It’s probably in my office somewhere. That is, if one of the students didn’t borrow it.” 

“Expensive thing to lose, cameras.” Boyne held Bill’s gaze a few seconds more, then straightened and patted the roof of the car. “Better keep an eye out. You never know where something like that might turn up.”

It definitely wouldn’t help Bill’s case if he threw up all over the FBI, his stomach tight and queasy. “Yeah. I’ll do that.”

The moment Boyne stepped away from the car, Bill shoved it into gear and drove away.

His hands started to shake once they were on the steering wheel, and didn’t stop until he was pulling in to his parking space back home.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oops; did this suddenly get smutty? Fancy that. The guys have some in-depth conversations about some sticky topics, but Bill finds it very hard to get to sleep...

Bill hauled the grocery bags into his apartment and stopped in the front hall. The door closed with a quiet click behind him. He had to warn Dorrek about the FBI sniffing around, had to make plans for what they’d do if Boyne came to the door…

Hang on. Was that running water?

Shower. Dorrek was in the shower. Bill’s traitor of an imagination promptly served up an idea of what he might look like in there, all those acres of rippling muscle glistening and wet, wreathed in curls of steam-

“Get a grip,” he muttered to himself, shaking off the image and the warmth spreading through his mid-section. The last thing he needed right now was to have to talk down a hard-on while putting the groceries away.

The water turned off, the pipes clanking in response. Bill grappled with the paper bags of food and got them over to the kitchen counter, dropping his hat on the end table and kicking off his shoes as he went.

“You’re home!” Dorrek emerged from the hallway, and Bill made the mistake of turning to greet him.

Glistening and wet, check. Acres of rippling muscle, also check.

Towel? No check.

No towel, either. Just Dorrek’s broad shoulders, his hairless chest marked with two small, pale nipples. A pink flush caressed his skin, across his upper arms and down as far as the firm curves of his pecs, remnants of the shower’s heat.

Bill’s eyes fell, he couldn’t help himself. That glorious chest transitioned down to a firm, slimmer waist, the lines of his abs visible against his skin. He had no hair there either, only a cock, uncut and lying at rest (for the moment, oh God, what would it look like erect? Hard and full, flushed dark, white come pearling at the slit-) between his solid thighs.

Bill’s face went hot, his dick hard as nails in his trousers, his head swimming from the sudden vacating of all the blood in there to somewhere entirely different. He could only offer his fervent thanks to the universe at large that the kitchen counter was between them so Dorrek wouldn’t see.

He opened his mouth to speak and only a faint, strangled whimper came out at first.

 _God, he’s beautiful_.

More than that; the word was entirely inadequate. He’d thought Dorrek was gorgeous before but seeing him naked was a revelation. _I want_ echoed in Billy’s head, no further thoughts possible.

And Dorrek was staring back at him with a bemused frown, like he knew something was wrong but couldn’t figure out what. No kidding. Billy was only staring openly at him like he’d never seen a naked man before, like he’d never before been so struck with the all-consuming desire to fall to his knees and worship.

He hadn’t, not like this, but he couldn’t explain that either.

Bill cleared his throat and looked away. Prime numbers – one, three, seven, eleven— “I brought food,” he said after a beat too long. _Seventeen, nineteen, twenty-three._ “The FBI were out in town, though. Boyne stopped me to ask a bunch of questions about you. We’re going to have to be careful.”

“You look shaken up,” Dorrek replied to that, frowning. “Do they suspect something?”

Dorrek was still watching him from the doorway, cataloguing Bill’s reaction. Was it Bill’s imagination, or was Dorrek’s cock getting hard?

No, no he was _not_ going to check, because that would require looking, and he’d been single and alone so goddamn long that if he stared he might come from that alone. Not happening. Especially when Dorrek would have absolutely no idea that he was having such an effect on Bill, or why.

“Probably. I don’t know if they’re on the right track, but they know at least part of your cover story is bull- can you go put some clothes on? Please?” Bill’s voice cracked slightly at the end. “Sorry. It’s just—distracting. Very distracting. To be holding a conversation with a naked man.”

Dorrek looked down at himself, like he was surprised to find himself entirely undressed. He _shifted,_ his skin rippling. Then that magnificent body was gone, tucked away behind what looked like a suit, except that Bill had just seen him do it. “Is that better?”

“That’s still your skin,” he pointed out, pressing his lips together to stop the rest of the comment from happening. “You’re not sitting on my couch with your naked rear end, even if it looks like wool.”

“But it doesn’t look like skin.”

“Doesn’t matter! I know you’re actually naked, and that’s the distracting part.” How and where would he feel pleasure if Billy stroked between his thighs right now, just slipped his hand in there and squeezed him? Had he put it _away_ somewhere else? Where did the nerve endings go? Could he reroute them to somewhere like his big toe? His thumb?

_Twenty-three. Come on. Thirty-one. Thirty-nine. No, thirty-seven._

“Sorry. I’ll be quick,” Dorrek promised, giving Bill one last, penetrating (oh, bad word choice. Don’t think about that either) look before he turned around to walk back down the hall.

Bill had not thought his request through carefully enough.

His ass—Bill could write odes to it, if he had any talent in poetry. Which he didn’t, sadly, so he’d be reduced to dying over the thought of running his hands over Dorrek’s muscled back, trailing his tongue down along Dorrek’s spine, into the dimples above his —well, where kidneys should be.

Prime numbers were not going to be enough to let him survive the night.

Dorrek disappeared into the bathroom, the sound of the door closing following him, and Bill sagged against the counter in relief. He pressed the heel of his hand firmly against his desperate hard-on, willing it down. Dorrek hadn’t asked for that, hadn’t asked to be stared at or objectified, turned into fodder for later fantasies. It was rude and classless to carefully file away every one of those perfect, precious frames of memory.

Bill got through the primes to seventy-nine before his heart slowed and his arousal started to fade. He poured himself a glass of cold water, briefly contemplated dumping it over his head instead, and took a long drink.

He was going to need one hell of a cold shower before bed.

* * *

It wasn’t as though Dorrek had fully planned to appear naked—he’d legitimately forgotten to wrap himself in a towel when he’d heard someone else in the apartment. Bodily modesty didn’t matter quite as much when your body could look any which way you wanted, and the shape he was wearing right now wasn’t even his. It wasn’t completely different in terms of physique, just taken down to more Earther proportions, but it was different enough that being undressed in it didn’t feel _exposed_.

When he’d seen Bill’s expression, though, and smelt the pheromone wave practically burst off him… that was when things had gotten a little more confusing.

Everything he’d seen and heard about Earth culture indicated that as a male, Bill should only be sexually responsive to female humans. Except that Dorrek now had ample proof that at least physiologically, that was definitely not the case.

So maybe he’d tested the theory out, just a little. But for now at least, he had to put his curiosity and his concerns aside and engage socially in a very different way than his racing pulse had wanted.

Right now, he had a plate of food in his hands that actually smelled remarkably good, and Bill was taking his seat opposite Dorrek on the other end of the couch.

“Don’t wait for me,” Bill said once he noticed Dorrek watching him. There was a hesitation and an awkwardness in the way he spoke that reminded him of the first night, and disappointment muddled in along with his other feelings. Maybe he’d pushed things too far.

He tried some of the unidentifiable things on his plate and found them surprisingly good. The tension in the air seemed to ebb after a few minutes of companionable quiet. He was about to speak, ask Bill to tell him more about this ‘FBI,’ when Bill jumped in ahead of him.

“We didn’t have time last night, things were too panicked. But I have to ask.” Bill sat forward, setting his empty plate on the low table and fixing Dorrek with an intense, searching expression. “What do you really look like?”

Dorrek crunched on a ‘pickle spear,’ the sour taste more familiar than any of the other flavour combinations. “I don’t know what you mean,” he hedged, waiting for Bill to clarify before giving too much away.

“I can accept the existence of life on other worlds, obviously,” Bill continued, his hands moving, inscribing shapes in the air in front of him as he spoke. “But given the diversity of life here on Earth, the pressures of different planetary atmospheres, the billions of ways evolution could have diverged, even slightly... there’s no way you evolved to look exactly like us.

“I’ve seen you change shape to other things, but what’s your real one? And are you using some kind of technology to do that? Light projection, maybe?”

Bill’s face was entirely too distracting, his eyes alight the way they’d been earlier today when Dorrek had been explaining Skrull methods of stellar cartography. He was eager and _interested_ , Dorrek the sole focus of his brilliance. It was heady and potent, too easy to fall into that laser-narrow regard and offer him everything he wanted to know. 

Dorrek set his plate aside the way Bill had done and shook his head. “It’s not technology, it’s innate. My people—well, one half of my people. My mother’s side are a race known as the Skrulls, and they’re shapeshifters. I’m Kree on my father’s side, but I can shift as well as any Skrull, and my baseline form is predominantly Skrull.”

The look he got from Bill made him burst out laughing. “You asked.”

“Shapeshifting, my ass. I asked for an explanation, not some Buck Rogers-Flash Gordon sci-fi bullshit,” Bill sighed, shaking his head. “Except it isn’t, is it? If I hadn’t seen it in person I’d be arguing for the existence of physics, conservation of mass, the sheer impossibility of any of it.

“I’m either having the longest, most involved dream of my entire life, or I’ve been thrown in the looney bin and I’m babbling in a straight-jacket somewhere.”

“I’m not even going to pretend to understand half of that last thing, but I also don’t know how to prove any of it to you beyond everything you’ve already seen.” Dorrek shrugged.

Bill shifted in his seat, turning to face Dorrek completely. He bit his bottom lip, his teeth making soft dents in the pink. “Can I see it?”

“See what?”

“You. Your ‘baseline form.’ Unless it’s one of those ‘human brains do not have the capacity to comprehend the multiple dimensions I occupy’ routines, because I prefer my brain as unmelted as I can manage. Which admittedly isn’t great most days.”

Dorrek laughed, but he didn’t think Bill was entirely joking. “I can show you. Only don’t be too startled.” He kept his eyes on Bill and let go of his hold on his human disguise, his skin, muscles, bones all flowing back to his preferred shape. The ‘him’ he returned to when everything else was gone.  

His skin deepened to a rich, burnished green, his shoulders broadening out beneath the sleeveless shirt Bill had loaned him the day before. His face changed as well, losing the flat human chin, growing back the curves that defined his jawline, the brown-flecked gold of his real eyes.  

“Holy shit,” Bill whispered, his eyes wide, and for a terrible second Dorrek was sure he’d scared him away. He reached out instead of shying away, brushing his fingertips along the sensitive lobes of Dorrek’s chin. Dorrek tried his best not to lean into the contact, his gaze fixed on Bill’s face and Bill’s eyes roaming everywhere, cataloguing the changes.

“That’s… not nearly as alien as I was imagining.” Bill bit his lip then drew his hand back. Dorrek reluctantly allowed it, the remaining heat from his caress drifting lazily across his skin.  

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“I’m not going to lie, it’s weird. But not in a bad way. Not bad at all,” he replied fervently. And that was the kind of compliment Dorrek would happily accept, that delightful tension back and making little crackles in his brain when he and Bill made eye contact. “What kind of shapes can you do?”

“Anything generally Skrull-sized,” Dorrek guessed. “I can go about half again as small, one and a half times as big.” Skrulls tended toward the slim but male Kree physiques were thicker, with more muscle, and taller to boot. Dorrek pulled on that image, bulked himself up further, adding muscle mass and tone, adding another five or six Earth inches to his height. The borrowed clothes strained against his musculature, too tight in his chest and thighs once he’d finished filling out.

There went another wave of pheromones rolling off of Bill, human-scented testosterone, lust, tinged with sex-smell and desire. It was the kind of thing other species used as a bioweapon, but one that Bill seemed to be entirely oblivious to. They wouldn’t have worked on Dorrek anyway, but he was a hundred percent certain that Bill didn’t even know he was doing it.

_Ah-hah._

Bill reached for him again, jerky like a puppet resisting its own strings, his face slowly pinking up. His fingertips stopped just shy of Dorrek’s chest, brushing the ribbed fabric of the snug undershirt before he snatched his hand back.

Dorrek tried to catch his eye, Bill finally looking up at his face, his pupils blown wide and dark. “Are you alright?” Dorrek asked, keeping his voice soft and low. Something trembled in the moment, Bill fighting some internal war that Dorrek couldn’t pretend to understand.

“Yeah,” Bill replied after a beat. “I’m just... you’re amazing. This whole situation is so far beyond anything I could ever imagine.”

They’d moved past comfort into something awkward, Dorrek’s alien shape certainly part of the issue. He reached out with his powers and pulled the human form around himself again, making himself smaller, pinker, his eyes bleaching back to pale blue and his chin receding. “In case someone comes to the door,” he explained at Bill’s soft sound of protest. “I can’t risk exposing you. What would your people do to me if they caught me here? You made it sound dire last night.”

Bill shook off the glazed look in his eyes and frowned. “It wouldn’t be good. We don’t have a great track record of treating our own people well, never mind those who would be seen as a possible threat.” He got up and headed for the kitchen, and a moment later Dorrek heard the faint suction-pop of the fridge opening. Bill came back a moment later, two glass bottles in his hands. “Tell me more about your people,” he urged, the pink flush gone from his face. “Your family. Do you have siblings?”

Dorrek shook his head. “Relationships are a little different, but the word maps. I don’t have any clutch-mates, but I do have some cousins.”  

“Wait-” Bill paused halfway through twisting the metal top off the bottle. “Clutch-mates? Okay. I have to ask,” he continued, looking embarrassed again. “How do you... breed?”

“Skrulls are egg-layers,” Dorrek replied, nothing there to be embarrassed about. “Kree are mammals and give live birth.”  

Bill popped the top off one of the bottles and handed it to him, the glass cold against Dorrek’s palm. “So you were… a live birth?” he asked, like it was a strange question.

Dorrek put the bottle to his lips, hit by the faint spray of popping carbon dioxide bubbles before he could get the liquid to his mouth. “Hatched, of course. My mother’s a Skrull.” He wiped the spray away with his thumb and peered a little more suspiciously at the bottle. He couldn’t read the human writing across the front, but the dark liquid had a neutral sort of look, even if the smell was strange.

“I suppose if it had been the reverse, if she were Kree and my father a Skrull, then I would have been gestated the mammal way. Which sounds appalling, honestly,” he added, the flash of a smile on Bill’s face before he pretended offense giving Dorrek his own small thrill. “Though ‘mother’ and ‘father’ aren’t exactly the same concepts either.”

“How so?” Bill asked, his bottle to his lips.

“It’s more a question of who wants to be the gestator and who the fertilizer,” Dorrek shrugged, the issue of finding the words for it in English more complicated than he’d thought when he’d introduced the topic. “Since we can change when we want to.”

Bill had some kind of choking fit, the liquid in the bottle obviously not agreeing with him. He coughed and hacked for a good few seconds, Dorrek getting progressively more concerned, before Bill finally set the bottle down and thumped his own sternum a couple of times, settling the cough. “I’m sorry, you can what?”

“Change genders,” Dorrek supplied helpfully, though he was watching Bill’s reactions very carefully as he spoke. “When you can change shape as easily as other species change clothing, which version of genitalia you have at any given moment is a basic matter of individual preference.”

“You’re saying you’re not actually-” Bill gestured up and down Dorrek’s body. “Male?”

“In a sense? I’m an exception, because I’m half Kree. It’s not the same for me as it is for full-blooded Skrulls.” Dorrek hesitated, the topic something that dug so firmly into his very sense of self, the way he’d struggled for years before coming to terms with it.

How could Bill, born into a single gender in a society that was based on a binary, understand what meant to be semi-static in a changeable world? And how could Dorrek explain it in a language he didn’t fully know?

“My body likes being male,” Dorrek settled on. “The Kree have solid genders, and the Skrull have either lots or none, depending on your perspective, so I ended up with … most of one.” He focused on the bottle in his hand, the smooth, cool surface, the condensation making little bubbles of water on the glass.

“It wasn’t easy to accept the idea. Gender… it’s supposed to be nebulous, not something that defines you. But I’ve come to terms with it. I’m a half-breed, and I feel like I’m male, and that’s not going to change.” He set his jaw, drawing on all that hard-won determination. “The onus is on everyone else to get over it.”

Bill nodded, still turning his bottle in his hands as though the bits of label he was picking off held the secrets of spaceflight. “So if gender is flexible, and you can change back and forth whenever you want, how does attraction work? Can you be attracted to anyone?”

“It’s more complicated than that, but I don’t know the words for it in your language,” Dorrek shook his head.

“Try,” Bill urged him. He wasn’t teasing, his voice quieter and more insistent than Dorrek had heard from him before. The answer to his question was something important to him, and Dorrek, dammit, didn’t have the context to understand why.

So he nodded, and tried to parse it out in words and ideas the human would understand. “If I were to simplify it down—some Skrulls are more comfortable in one form than another. Some don’t display genders at all, while others switch as the mood strikes them, as often as minute to minute. My mother, the Imperial Princess, always chose to present as female, but that doesn’t mean she couldn’t have become the Prince if she felt the need.

“Some prefer their partners one way or another, some don’t care.”

He’d never been able to reach that particular kind of zen. Not only was he drawn to _being_ male, he was drawn to _loving_ males. And no meditations or trying to better-embody his Skrull side had ever made a difference in that.

“What often happens is someone who doesn’t feel strongly about it might stay in their partner’s preferred form. I suppose it would be the same as you growing a beard because your wife liked it, even if you didn’t care about grooming styles.”

Bill looked like he was chewing on that idea, but he didn’t hesitate long before continuing the questioning. “And your father wouldn’t mind if she did switch? He’s male, right?”

Dorrek winced. “That wasn’t really an issue that ever came up. My father… isn’t around. He’s not welcome in the Empire, as per my grandfather’s decree. Technically he wasn’t welcome back then, either.” Bill was going to ask, Dorrek could see him winding up with a new barrage of questions, so he got out in front of them before he had to sit through the interrogation.

“Making a very long story very short, the Kree and Skrull have been at war for millennia. Mar-vell, my father, is a military hero among the Kree. He was taken prisoner, taken to Throneworld for execution… and my mother was rather taken with him. Then nature, apparently, took its course.” Dorrek shrugged. “I was the result.”

“Ouch,” Bill winced.

“Politics are complicated,” was all Dorrek really had to offer. And rather than get drawn into a lengthy discussion about family feuds and interstellar drama, he changed the subject back to what seemed like safer ground. “It’s all male and female pairings here, isn’t it?”

“Not... really.” Bill sipped his drink, and was it Dorrek’s imagination, or had he gone a little pale? He’d lost the bright spark in his eyes, replaced with the same kind of fierce certainty and determination that Dorrek had felt himself only moments ago.

_What’s going on here?_

“That’s all you’ll ever see on television and the movies, but there are women who prefer women. And men who prefer men. Except that acting on it is against the law. You can go to prison for that. In some places you can still be executed for it. And wanting to change sexes—that’s considered a mental illness. That’s a one-stop-trip to electroshock therapy and lobotomies.”

“To _what_?” Dorrek recoiled, shock and disgust flooding him at the sheer insanity of the statement. “That’s barbaric! How can someone’s private life be policed like that? Over _gender_?” It was different when gender was set rather than malleable, obviously. But still! He’d assumed humans were just designed that way, not that repression was part of their legal protocols.

“Like Skrulls are perfect?” Bill shot back, his hackles up. “Your father got in trouble for being with your mother, so don’t blame humans for policing love lives.”

Dorrek shook his head adamantly. “That’s political, that’s different. It was the ‘Kree’ part that was the issue. The problem would have been the same if he’d been a woman.”

“It’s not that different,” Bill replied hotly. “It’s still a violation. Even a ‘barbaric’ one. But if you’re going to say that Skrulls are superior, I’m calling bullshit.”

He still couldn’t let it go, the urge and conflicting suspicions coiling up inside him. If Bill was- and Dorrek was certain now that he was- and his own people were willing to jail or murder him for it, then the sanest and best thing to do would be to offer him passage back to the Empire.

Selfishness didn’t come into it. That was saving a life.

“So those people,” Dorrek prompted, careful not to make the sweeping assertion that he was sure was true. “What do they do?”

Bill took a drink from his bottle, shaking his head. “Break the law. Live quiet lives. Meet secretly and hope no-one gives them away. Hope that they come across someone who feels the same and keep their relationship as private as possible. Make plans for revolution.” Melancholy echoed in his voice and in his eyes.

“Spend their lives hiding, in other words.”

“Open secrets. The phrase ‘confirmed bachelor’ exists for a reason.” Bill narrowed his eyes at Dorrek, his lips pressed tight together. “One thing they don’t need, or want, is _pity_. Especially not from someone who doesn’t have the context to understand.”

That wasn’t fair! … maybe it was a little fair. “I want to understand,” Dorrek compromised between the truth and what he wanted to be the truth instead.

“Why?”

“Earth fascinates me. It has for a while.” _And I want to understand you._ But Bill hadn’t revealed anything in words, nothing that he could seize on to make a subject of conversation. And Dorrek wasn’t about to call attention to that awkward naked interlude earlier. Not with Bill still bristling and defensive.

Bill shook his head and settled back against his end of the couch again. “We’re not that fascinating. What I want to hear more about it this space empire of yours.”

He took the subject change for the mild rebuke that it was and didn’t pursue the topic any further. Let Bill shut him out for now; Dorrek would figure it out on his own.

* * *

The ‘later’ for contemplation came that night once they’d called it a night, Dorrek—presumably—fast asleep on the couch, and Bill back in his small, quiet bedroom. Like the rest of the apartment, it wasn’t much to look at. A double bed, a chair that ended up with clothes flung over it more often than not, a nightstand with a lamp, a stack of books he was never going to read, and a drawer that rarely got opened except for the bottle of hand cream, these days.

Not that he’d had a fabulous sex life before moving to New Mexico. Being an awkward, gangly teen hadn’t done much for him with the high school set. The only other queer fellow he’d ever even heard of was one of his grandfather’s old friends, the phrase ‘confirmed bachelor’ always followed by a faint snicker or curled lip, depending on the speaker. Bill had only just discovered hints of the social scene in New York before leaving for college, and his growing confidence and handful of successes once there had been cut off at the knees when he’d hit the pressures of grad school.

And now he was here, where the people were friendly, but the likelihood of him ever running into anyone who would be both his type _and_ looking for what Bill had to offer was a Xeno’s Arrow paradox. Forever approaching zero.

Given all that, could he really be blamed for his hormones losing their ever-loving minds right now? Bill tossed his trousers over the chair with a sigh of his own, leaping to catch it as the addition of one more thing sent it toppling backwards toward the floor. There was a metaphor for his life in there somewhere, if he looked at it long enough.

Last night he’d been consumed with the knowledge of alien life, his brain spinning with the ramifications, the science, the sheer _impossibility_ of what he was being asked to accept. Now he’d spent the day with Dorrek, seen more of him than he had any right to, and it was impossible to think of him as anything but a man.

A very large _green_ man, apparently, but there you go.

And one who seemed to think of gender as something akin to a pair of socks, deciding which one to put on for the day. Sort of, anyway. He ‘felt male,’ whatever that meant to him. Bill was pretty damn sure he’d ‘feel male’ to Bill, too.

And there went those thoughts again, the memory seared into his retinas. Acres of clean-shaven muscle, shoulders that had to be twice the width of Bill’s, the curve of bone that angled a perfect V along his hips.

“Argh.” Bill flopped onto his bed and shoved his face into his pillow. The buttons from his shirt dug into his chest, caught on a funny angle, and he flopped onto his back to finish undressing. The ceiling loomed above him, the circle of light from his lamp barely chasing back the shadows hiding the corners of his room.

It would be nicer in the living room, maybe with the lights on, mapping out alien terrain with his fingertips, lips and tongue-

Dorrek’s fingers being the ones to undo his buttons, his hands pushing Bill’s shirt off his shoulders-

There had been some moments when he was sure that Dorrek was thinking something similar. When they’d talked about what it was like, being gay when it was outlawed—when he’d walked in naked and Bill had only been able to stare—when they’d said goodnight, and Dorrek had extended his hand to help Bill off the couch (totally unnecessary but he’d taken the offer anyway), his palm broad and warm, his fingers curling around Bill’s almost… possessively.

“This is called ‘projection,’ for the record,” Bill told himself out loud, dropping his shirt on the floor. He shut his mouth quickly and listened, but there was no rustle or sign of movement from the hallway, or the living room at the other end. Dorrek was probably out cold by now, not troubled in the slightest by the kind of frustration simmering in Bill’s blood.

Hell, he probably had a half-dozen green-skinned space girls waiting for him back home. A guy who looked like that, from a society where they didn’t have human-style hangups about sex, and a son of an Imperial Princess? There’d be no saying no to him. And who in their right mind would?

Dorrek was probably some interstellar playboy, spreading ‘diplomacy’ across the galaxy. Bill wasn’t that special.

Unfortunately, the so-called talking down only presented a whole new set of mental images for Bill’s close examination. His cock, half-awake for most of the evening already, appreciated them very much. The ache spread down his thighs and up into his stomach the longer he tried to ignore it.

The smart thing to do would be to jerk it quietly, get rid of the build-up of energy. Then he could face the man tomorrow like a normal, sane person and not some half-starved sex-fiend.

Dorrek was asleep, he’d never know.

Bill ran his hand down his chest, the thin cotton of his undershirt bunching against his palm. He shouldn’t be doing this. Dorrek hadn’t asked to be stared at (except it seemed at one point like he had), would probably be embarrassed or angry if he knew that Bill was thinking about him this way (except that he’d all but said outright that he could be attracted to men as well as women).

Thinking things through wasn’t helping, his fingertips teasing along the hem of his undershirt, fighting the urge just to take himself in hand.

What if Dorrek heard? What if he came in?

 _What if he came in, holy shit_.

Maybe he’d join in, imagine that big hand closing around Bill’s cock. Bill wasn’t small, but Dorrek’s fist would be big enough to hold him all, his fingers tight as he stroked. Maybe aliens loved sucking cock. Maybe he’d put that gorgeous mouth on Bill’s dick and swallow him down, take him deep inside where everything was hot and tight and silk-slick wet.

Bill’s hips jerked all on their own, his undershorts already getting damp where the head of his cock pushed against the cotton. Muttering a curse under his breath, he rolled over and grabbed for the drawer, fumbling for the bottle of lotion inside.

Shoving his undershorts down around his hips, that first stroke of his hand was a god-damned revelation. Half-dormant nerve endings sparked back to life, his fist tight around his cock and the lotion already hot from his skin and the friction.

So much better than jerking it to flat magazine images; he knew how Dorrek moved, how his hand felt, the sound of his voice. His lips, god, his lips, how they’d look stretched around Bill’s cock, those eyes flicking up to look at him from under his lashes, his big hands pushing Bill’s thighs apart to give himself room-

He’d gotten to the edge of coming without realizing it, his dick heavy and thick in his hand, balls drawing up tight. Bill gasped, and—oh. Oh no.

Sound from the living room?

Movement?

Breathing?

Was he coming-

Bill hovered on the precipice, hand frozen tight, pad of his thumb pressed hard against the cluster of nerves right below his cock head, trembling.

Maybe a snore?

Had Dorrek snored the night before?

Could he hear Bill, despite his best efforts to stay quiet?

_Please please stay asleep-_

The noise didn’t come again, the air still, the whole apartment electric-charged. Bill strained to hear, not moving, his hips flexing and muscles trembling as he fought the urge to keep going. _So close._

No steps, no accusations. Nothing but the very faint sound of a body moving, maybe rolling over, a soft breath that might be a gasp of his own-

_Now I’m just imagining things._

Oh, but _what if_.

His lip bitten tight between his teeth, Bill moved his hand. Slowly, regrouping, finding the space he’d been in before. Pearling beads from pre-come dotted his stomach, eased his hand as the lotion got sticky, the friction so blessedly sweet.

_A breath._

_Even if he isn’t, I can pretend he is._

That was enough, that picture—Dorrek standing in the hallway again like he had before, no towel, his cock standing high and his hand wrapped around it, sliding up and down while his face flushed and he tipped his head back-

Bill arched, lightning firing in his brain and out through his cock. He came, splattering white over his hand, his lip bitten so hard that pain added its note to the pleasure-symphony singing in his head.

Half-sure he cried out anyway, half-sure he heard an echo from the other end of the apartment, he fucked into his hand and pretended it was someone else’s.

Stroking through it until the sensation was more discomfort than pleasure, he collapsed back to the bed, spent. Spent and waiting for the rush of calm, the white-out bliss—soon to be followed by sleep—that would make him feel, if only for a moment, that everything was right in the world.

It didn’t come, the mess inside his head refusing to untangle. The ache and throb of desperate lust were gone, replaced with a tingle across his skin and a lost sort of emptiness instead.

No more noises came from anywhere inside the apartment. He’d probably imagined them all anyway, so desperate for Dorrek to have seen through him, to have seen _him_.

To hell with it all.

Clean up, go to sleep. And in the morning, try and find more information on the missing spaceship, so that the alien in his living room could go back to his space harem.

What was one more game of what-if in a lifetime full of them?


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hail hail, the gang's all here... a few more familiar faces join the party.

The sun woke Bill before his alarm could, slanting in between the slats of his blinds and cutting sharp, bright lines across his face. He groaned and buried his face in the pillow, still groggy. He’d eventually dozed but it hadn’t been restful, rolling over every hour or two in that half-dream daze too awake to be called sleep, but too close to sleep to be aware enough to do anything about it.

Oh yeah. Today was going to be fun.

He dressed on autopilot but paused with his hand on the doorknob. What would be waiting for him out there? There had been a moment last night when he’d been sure—hallucinating, maybe, or desperate—but sure nevertheless that Dorrek had heard him. Had maybe even been caught up in the same moment. That echo of sound rang in his memory again.

What if he _had_ heard? What if he was waiting in the living room, arms folded and angry, ready to take Bill to task for violating him? Maybe masturbation was a taboo for Skrulls and Bill had been horrifically rude, even though he’d been down the hall, behind a closed door.

What if he’d heard, been disgusted, and was gone?

That might be easier than having to face down Dorrek and explain himself.

_Coward._

Bill ignored the voice yammering at him from inside his brain, grabbed the handle and pushed him way out into the day. Dorrek wasn’t waiting in the hall to yell at him, nor in the bathroom. That gave him a reprieve to wash and shave and get ready to face things on slightly steadier terms.

Dorrek was standing when Bill made it to the living room, by the window with the previous day’s newspaper in his hands. He was dressed—or shapeshifted?—in the same suit he’d had on the day before, his hair lying combed the way Nate’s had been. _He’s been studying us._

The sun came in through the window the way it had in Bill’s bedroom and cast a nimbus of light around Dorrek’s head, a saint in front of the stained glass of a cathedral.

The air left Bill’s lungs in what had to be an audible woosh. Dorrek looked up.

Bill had his attention now, but at what cost?

“Good morning,” Dorrek greeted him, and was there some new tone in his voice? A question, riding soft below the actual words? His eyes lingered on Bill’s face, and if he reached out… Bill had the momentary certainty that Dorrek would allow him to touch.

For the sake of Bill’s sanity, he was going to pretend that he wouldn’t.

_He did hear. Somehow he knows._

A new, different energy crackled in the air. Had Dorrek’s lower lip always curled out in a hint of a pout like that? Or had Bill been too busy noticing his biceps to catch on?

“Morning,” he greeted Dorrek in as normal a voice as he could muster.

If Dorrek wasn’t going to bring it up, then Bill was going to take his reprieve and run. He nodded in a friendly sort of way as he headed for the kitchenette. _Remember his space harem._

Dorrek watched him go, his lips parting for a moment as though he was about to ask a question, before apparently thinking better of it and closing his mouth again. “Is it alright to ask now about the plan for the day, or should I wait until you’ve imbibed your coffee?” he asked instead, a low, amused and companionable rumble in his voice.

Forcing his mind—kicking and screaming—back to the here and now rather than run through all the possible permutations of what any of his gestures or words might mean, Bill cracked a smile around the awkwardness. “Now’s fine. I do need coffee, though. I…” _didn’t sleep well last night_. That would open the door to questions and he wasn’t ready. Would never be ready. “Need that wake-up call first thing.” Better.

“But speaking of calls-” Bill set the coffee pot going and headed for the phone on the side table. “Hopefully someone’s gotten back to me about the convoy yesterday. If not, we’ll have to figure out a different plan.” The lines weren’t too busy first thing in the morning, which got him connected to the observatory’s answering service in no time. Dorrek, leaning against the wall, watched him curiously, head slightly cocked like he was observing something utterly foreign.

“Hi, Suzanne. It’s Dr. Kaplan. Are there any messages for me?” Bill asked when the service operator answered the line, and held while she shuffled through the night’s notecards at the other end.

“Only one, Doctor Kaplan,” she chirped cheerfully, far too pleasant for someone who had either been awake all night already, or who had come on shift at some ungodly hour of the morning. “From Doctor Khan at the Denton Observatory. She says that the package you were calling about was delivered to the Fort Worth Army Base early this morning. Sounds like you can relax, Doctor, your mail made it there safely.”

“That’s great, Suzanne, thank you.” Bill scribbled the information on the notepad beside the phone.

“There’s a message for Doctor Richards as well, if you want to take it for him.”

For Nate? It was an easy choice, considering how obsessive Nate had been about the ship the day before. “Sure, fire away. I’ll pass it on,” Bill lied without hesitation.

“It’s from Doctor Essex’s assistant. She says that the doctor would be very interested in Dr. Richards’ findings, and that his lab is at Dr. Richards’ disposal to examine any biological specimens he might acquire. That’s the word she used, ‘acquire,’ isn’t that a funny choice? Anyway, she said it was important that he get the message but not urgent enough to wake him.”

“No, that’s fine, thank you,” Bill jotted that down as well, though his mind was spinning up into gear faster than coffee could have done. Essex—he was a geneticist out of Yale, Nate’s old alma mater. Brilliant scientist, with the kind of personality that needed brilliance as an excuse. More importantly, his name was usually followed by rumours that he’d been involved with the Nazi science wing. Why would Nate be calling _him_?

Except Nate wouldn’t necessarily care about the rumours. All he’d see would be the lab, and the expertise.

“Thanks very much, Suzanne,” he was babbling, and needed to get off the phone before he said something dumb. “Have a good day.”

She chirped something back but he wasn’t listening, already settling the heavy receiver back in the phone cradle. _Nate, what are you doing?_

His blood chilling second by second, Bill could envision exactly what kind of biological samples Nate might be anticipating.

One of them was standing in his living room watching him. “What’s happened?” The tension rippled through Dorrek’s body, the suit shifting back to his purple and black space suit and back again.

“I know where your ship is, and we can’t trust Nate with any of this.” Bill tore the sheet of paper off the notepad, folded and jammed it in his pocket. “He’s been talking to a geneticist. I’m guessing about finding a place to run tests on alien life. We need to get you out of town before he figures anything out.”

“That’s easy enough,” Dorrek replied, tucking his blaster in the back of his waistband and heading for the door. “Assuming your vehicle doesn’t break down again,” he added, a twinkle in his eye.

“She’s a good car. And of the two of us, I’m not the one who crashed into a planet. You’d think that’d be a target big enough to miss.” Bill shoved his feet into his shoes. Jacket, wallet, keys, hat-

Coffee. He ducked into the kitchen and filled a thermos, hissing as some of the hot liquid splashed over his thumb from the sloppy pour.

Dorrek reached out for Bill’s hand when he came back out into the hall. “Are you alright?” Bill, stupidly enough, let him take it.

The red splotch tingled from the momentary scald. The rest of Bill’s hand tingled from the contact. “It’ll be fine. It’s not a bad burn; it won’t even blister.”

“If you say so,” Dorrek replied, clearly dubious. But of course he would be, he could heal. Anything that stuck around longer than a second or two probably seemed really bad. He stopped looking at Bill’s hand, lifting his chin and catching Bill’s eye instead.

Barely more than six inches of space between them, tethered by Dorrek’s hand around his, the walls began to close in. The air got thick and hard to breathe. “Bill-” he said softly, and Bill was imagining so much tenderness and compassion in his voice that his entire chest ached.

“We need to go,” Bill replied, his voice matching Dorrek’s in timbre and strength as he took his hand back. “We- yeah. Go time.”

His back pulling straight, his hand dropping back to his side, Dorrek nodded. The distance was back, even though neither of them had moved. “Where to?” he asked, opening the door and holding it for Bill—and in such a way that Bill almost had to squeeze past him in order to get out. His shoulder brushed Dorrek’s chest, a reminder of just how firm and physically powerful he was, and Bill ignored the way his insides clenched.

“The city library,” Bill said, locking up and taking long strides down the hallway, expecting Dorrek to fall in step. He wasn’t disappointed. “I don’t have a map for Texas, and I don’t know much of anything about Fort Worth itself, but I know someone who can help me find out.”

* * *

 

Bill drove them through the town, a quaint, small thing with buildings surely no more than twenty feet high, all made of stone and brick. They didn’t have communication arrays and transporters, but there was a warmth and a rounded-edge softness to the place that Throneworld, with its high silver spires and jagged-edged cliffs, entirely lacked.

Dorrek tried his best not to stare at the new things they passed. The people were getting a little more familiar, after a day at the observatory and reading the local news feeds. It was the little things—the boxes on the side of the road that Bill called ‘mailboxes’ to send physical communications, for instance, or the different sorts of hats that every adult wore outdoors —that were worthy of note.

They only made a quick turn once, when Bill’s watchful eye stuck on a man in a black suit on a street corner. He veered the car around the corner and down a smaller side street, Dorrek grabbing for the broken door handle and hanging on tight so he wouldn’t be thrown clear. “FBI,” Bill said after slowing down, Dorrek managing to pull himself back up to sitting.

“Because that kind of maneuver won’t be at all suspicious,” Dorrek pointed out dryly, and got an exasperated glare back for his troubles. They pulled in beside an old brick building, the front marked with a big sign proclaiming it the Roswell Public Library. Wide stairs led up to a pair of double doors, bay windows on either side letting in the light.

It took him some struggling to decode the text on a sign posted beside the door, even with the clear block letters. It read ‘Whites Only.’

When he turned to ask, Bill was heading for a different door, this one on the side of the building and set in beside some round metal garbage receptacles. The sign above that one read ‘Colored Only.’

“What does that mean?” Dorrek asked quietly, catching up to Bill and nodding toward the sign. “From what I’ve seen, humans don’t come in white. You’re all shades of pink and brown.”

“It’s the ‘brown’ that’s the issue,” Bill’s jaw was set, something almost… haunted appearing behind his eyes. “Among other things. A lot of people in charge believe that different groups of humans are genetically inferior to others, and it’s mostly based on skin colour. So buildings get segregated, washrooms get segregated, god-damn drinking fountains get segregated, just in case… I don’t know. Brown skin is catching?

“And some groups get caught in the middle. White enough to sit at the white-only lunch counters, not white enough to go to college or get a job without changing our names. And then when all that rhetoric gets bad enough, we get murdered.”

He grabbed the door handle and wrenched it open, his entire body vibrating, a string plucked in fury and set to riot.

Dorrek caught the edge of the door, curiosity eating him alive. It wasn’t that he didn’t get it. The pink-skinned Kree had been looking down on the blue Kree for millennia, and all of them figured the Skrulls were wastes of genetic material. The Empire and the Hivemind were no strangers to atrocities. But Bill—he needed to know why _Bill_ had gone from regular stress levels to looking like he wanted to murder someone, or cry, or both.

He got in the doorway and Bill kept going, at least until Dorrek caught his arm and made him turn. “What’s happened? Where do you fit into all this?” Not a perpetrator, surely. Not him.

Bill swallowed hard, his throat bobbing. “What happened was that millions of my people have just been murdered. Not here, overseas. In Europe. Shot, burned, gassed alive. Because we’re seen as inferior. A ‘plague’ on humankind. No-one knows how bad it was yet, the war ended less than two years ago. They keep finding more bodies. The numbers keep going up.”

Skrulls weren’t cold-blooded by nature, but Dorrek discovered in that moment that his own blood could certainly feel like it had turned to ice in his veins. “And the people who did this –"

“Some are dead. Some are in hiding. I don’t think they’ll ever all be caught.” Bill shook his head and pulled his arm away. “People have to _want_ to catch them first.”

And they don’t want to, was the unspoken and obvious corollary. How many of Bill’s relations had died? People he knew? How far away was ‘Europe’ and how close had Bill gotten to the danger?

Dorrek parked the interrogation for now, Bill’s tension not receding. “I’m sorry,” Dorrek said softly.

“So am I.” Bill looked away, heading further down the dimly lit basement hallway. Lights flickered, the shadows sliding on the bare walls. Dorrek had to hustle to fall in step again, casting about for something, anything, to change the subject.

“Who is it we’re here to meet?” he asked as Bill led them up a flight of metal stairs. “You mentioned a map—a cartographer?”

“A librarian,” Bill replied, grabbing the door and hauling it open. “And one of the bravest men I know.”

The room on the other side was nothing like the dingy, damp basement they’d just travelled through, the light pouring in the big windows bright and welcoming. Shelves stood every few feet, all of them lined fore and aft with books, long wooden desks and cushioned chairs taking up one corner of the space. A handful of people (all pale-skinned, now that Dorrek started to look for it) sat at some of the tables, reading newspapers or paging through books.

A sign over a small side room read ‘Colored Reading Room.’ He paused to look inside. The space was cramped, the windows facing the brick wall of the building opposite, but someone had taken exceptional care to make the room feel more welcoming. Gauzy curtains hung over the windows, brightly coloured science posters on the walls, a glass pitcher of water and cups sat on a table in the corner, and a box of toys by some very small chairs.

“Over here,” Bill beckoned, heading between two tall shelves. Another man—handsome, dark-skinned and impeccably dressed in a nice suit, a bow tied beneath his chin—was there with a cart of books. He glanced at a series of numbers along the spine of the one in his hand before filing it between two others. “Eli!”

“Bill.” Eli shook his hand and cast a questioning glace over Dorrek. “Who’s your friend?”

What had been the name Bill had used for his yesterday? Right. “Ted Dorrek,” Dorrek proclaimed, and held out his hand. “Pleased to meet you.” Eli hesitated for a second and then shook it, his grip warm and strong.

“Ted’s a grad student staying with me for the week while he visits the observatory.”

“So what brings you to the library? Giving Ted the grand tour of magnificent Roswell?” The way Eli looked him over, careful and considering, left Dorrek wondering how much, exactly, he knew about Bill. Maybe they’d been lovers, once upon a time? Except that didn’t fit with the way they stood. Comfortable, certainly, but not so much so that they had probably known one another intimately.

(And why did Dorrek suddenly care about that answer? He was putting too much stock on half-hints, eavesdropping, unconscious pheromones and assumptions.)

“Not exactly. We’re… going on a road trip. To Fort Worth. Do you have any maps with the locations of the observatory?”

“Denton? Sure. Maps are over here.” Eli gestured, leaving his cart behind. He dropped his voice to more of a whisper when they re-emerged into the main room, the silence of the rest of the readers almost oppressive. Dorrek caught one of the older men there watching the three of them, his eyes dropping back to his paper when he realized he’d been caught staring. “But why do you need one from the library? Any gas station will have a basic road map.”

Bill nodded, picking at the skin on one side of his thumbnail. “It’s not the only thing I’m looking for,” he admitted, glancing back over his shoulder. “I also need whatever you’ve got on the base itself.”

Eli stopped leafing through the folded paper maps, staring at Bill. “The army base?”

“Maps, layouts, I don’t suppose they ever filed blueprints?” Bill asked hopefully.

“If they did, they’d be on file in Fort Worth, not here, and probably under lock and key at city hall or the planning office, not a rinky-dink library in a different state,” Eli reminded him dryly. “What do you need plans of a military base for?”

“I can’t tell you that.” Bill leaned forward, resting his elbow on the cabinet. Dorrek moved over slightly so that the old man, watching them again, wouldn’t be able to read Bill’s lips. “All I can say is that it’s important.”

“Important. But you can’t tell me why, or what you plan to do with them once you have them.”

“Please, Eli?” Bill put his hand on Eli’s arm with his impassioned plea. A hiss came from the old man at the table, and Bill shot a dirty look back at him without removing his hand.

Eli’s lips pressed flat and he glared at them both, folding his arms. The map dangled from his hand. “I would, but I can’t, so I won’t. I don’t have anything like that here. I can get you a tourist book on Fort Worth’s sightseeing options, a Texas road map and a couple of histories of the US military, but that’s all. For what you want, you’ll need the planning department on the base. And maybe, if you’re very lucky, a building permit on file with the city.”

“If we could get on the base to see the plans, we wouldn’t need the plans in the first place,” Bill muttered under his breath, and Eli’s eyes narrowed.

“If you’re getting me implicated in something illegal-”

“You’re not involved,” Bill held up a hand.

“And it’s not illegal?”

“Didn’t exactly say that. But it is important.”

“Does it have anything to do with the FBI agents all over town? If it was just about that balloon crash, they should have cleared out yesterday.” Eli addressed that one to Dorrek, shifting his attention.

“I’m not FBI, I wouldn’t know,” Dorrek tried to dodge the question, shrugging in a way he’d seen Bill do before.

Eli’s skeptical look didn’t waver. “Mm-hm.” After a beat, he nodded and flicked the end of the map up toward Bill. Bill grabbed it, a smile crossing his face and lighting him up for the first time that day. “… No. You know what? Don’t get me involved, it’s none of my business, and I don’t want to know.”

“Cross my heart,” Bill swore. “Now about those other books?”

“This way.” Eli closed the drawer with a click. But before he began to move, he frowned. He stared at them both and met Dorrek’s gaze particularly, gears and levers whirling behind his eyes. Dorrek met his eyes and held them, trying to project innocence as much as possible. Eli broke the look after another heartbeat, shaking his head.

He brought them more books than just the tourist guide, though. And even as they packed up to leave, Bill shoving his hastily-taken notes into his jacket pocket, Eli stood by the desk and watched, taking it all in.

* * *

 

Bill led Dorrek out through the same alley door, his own little—very little, essentially worthless—gesture of rebellion towards a system that he hated to his core. Using the Whites Only door felt like tacit acceptance of the hideous unfairness of it all, especially considering who and what _he_ was.

He could’ve gotten into Harvard if he’d lied. If he’d changed his name to something other than ‘Kaplan.’ He’d had the grades, the recommendation letters, the drive. Everyone had agreed. ‘Bill Kramer’—or King or Konrad—could have made something of himself.

And look at him now. He’d refused to let go of his Jewishness, his _Yiddishkeit,_ and in return he still had his doctorate, he had a job doing the science he loved. But in an observatory with a staff of four, connected to the college tangentially at best, in a New Mexico town so small that there were more post offices than other Jews.

“Look at me now, indeed,” he muttered to himself. Leaving that same tiny New Mexico town to help an alien break into an army base to steal technology from outer space. Only an idiot would be planning this.

On the other hand, who else but another lost refugee would have understood Dorrek’s fear and isolation enough to take a chance on him so quickly?

Maybe things did happen for a reason.

“What was that?” Dorrek asked from behind him. Bill pulled open the door and shook his head.

“Just talking to myself. Nothing-”

“Whose vehicle is that?”

There were two cars parked where he’d only left one. Bill’s old beater had been joined by a sleek black Buick, not nearly enough road dust on it to be something owned by a local for any length of time. He didn’t recognize the plates either. “Back in the library,” he urged, grabbing for the door handle again. “We’ll go out the other door and head for the apartment.”

The passenger-side door opened before Bill could get Dorrek to make a run for it, but it wasn’t Agent Boyne who unfolded himself from the leather seats. The young man had a suit on, sure, but blue instead of black, and his face was very familiar. Bill saw a dark-haired version of it on a daily basis.

“Tommy,” he breathed out, shoulders sagging in relief (not about to be arrested) before tightening up again in shock (what is he doing _here_?).

“You know him?” Dorrek asked then looked back and forth between them, a metaphorical light bulb going on over his head. “Ah.”

Bill’s twin—whose white-blond hair and green eyes marked them as fraternal, thank you very much, despite their otherwise identical features—grinned and tossed off a half-assed salute at the pair of men before circling the car to open the door for the driver.

It didn’t take a whole lot to guess who that was going to be.

“Billy!” Kate Bishop emerged, in all her New-Look pencil-skirt-suited glory, sunglasses perched behind the victory rolls in her hair and white gloves covering her hands. Bill was halfway to them by the time she got clear of the car, and Tommy grabbed him first in an enthusiastic, back-patting hug.

“What are you doing here?” Bill asked once Tommy’d let him go and Kate took his place. She pressed her bright red lips to his cheek, leaving a cheerful smudge behind. “I told you-”

“You told us precisely nothing useful,” Kate chided him, smacking him in the chest with her clutch purse. “Which means something big is going down. You’re never cagey when your life is boring. I practically have to hang up on you to make you stop moaning about it.”

“I changed my mind, I’m not glad to see you anymore,” Bill said firmly, stepping back and folding his arms.

Tommy was already eyeing Dorrek carefully, his grin going sharp and his hand extending. “Tom Shepherd.”

Either Dorrek didn’t grasp the significance of Tommy’s changed surname or he didn’t feel like calling attention to it, because he didn’t go for the obvious question. He took Tommy’s offered hand instead and shook it. “Ted Dorrek,” he replied, with a quick, darted glance Bill’s way.

Something happened in the shake, Tommy’s smug look fading and eyes flickering wide for a second. When they let go, he surreptitiously shook out his fingers.

“We haven’t met,” Kate purred, danger in her sharp smile. “Kate Bishop.” And she extended her hand as well.

“Kate’s a _reporter_ ,” Bill interjected, the hairs on the back of his neck going up at the undercurrents and the gleam in Kate’s eye. “Her father runs a major media conglomerate out of New York. Ted’s a visiting academic, only for a few days, doing some research at the lab.” He tried the lie that had been carrying them through the last couple of days and held his breath.

“So there’s a mysterious fireball in the sky,” Kate drawled, folding her arms and staring Bill and Dorrek down in turn. “Which the _military_ takes the trouble to announce that we should ignore, and then starts a press blackout. Locals are going on about bug-eyed monsters. The observatory’s bringing in external experts—or it’s some incredibly coincidental timing—and you’re going to stick to the ‘it’s just a weather balloon’ story? Come on Billy,” she coaxed. “What’s really going on here?”

“We really can’t say,” Dorrek replied, looking apologetic. He also kept glancing over Tommy’s shoulder toward the street, but no-one else was pulling in to the alley, or even casting a glance down towards the little group. “But it’s nothing to concern yourselves with, I promise.”

Yeah, that was already not going to work. Bill knew his brother, and he knew Kate.

On the other hand… he _knew_ them both, and there was something to be said for safety in numbers.

Tommy grabbed for the book and map tucked under Bill’s arm, snagging them while he was too distracted for that instant to stop him. “Texas road map? Planning a vacation?”

“Bill! Glad I caught you.” The door behind him opened and Eli stepped out, a large envelope in his hand. “I thought of this after you- oh.”

Tommy grinned again, brash as could be. “And the ‘nothing to concern ourselves with’ involves the local archivist as well. Curiouser and curiouser, little brother. What have you gotten yourself into?”

“Shepherd,” Eli replied in greeting, much less enthusiastically than when Bill’d shown up. One short visit really shouldn’t have generated so much animosity, especially not after a year had gone by, but then none of the three of them (four of them, if Bill was going to be brutally honest with himself) ever did things by half-measures. “Miss Bishop.”

“Bradley,” Tommy returned the dry greeting.

“Mr. Bradley,” Kate added after him, her smile much more genuine—which was, of course, the entire problem.

Tension crackled up around them again, and Bill did the only thing he could think of to change the subject. “You found something for us?”

“I did,” Eli glanced over at Tommy and Kate before he spoke, his gaze fell on the book and map in Tommy’s hands, then gave a faint shrug and carried on. “I remembered a donation box that came in a couple of years ago. We’ve only just started cataloging everything, but there were a set of letters inside from the donor’s … father, I think. Who was stationed at Fort Hood. There might be some useful details in there, for the trip that I know absolutely nothing about.”

“Thanks so much,” Bill sighed.

“Fort Hood? Are you planning a revolution?” Kate asked, her eyes alight. “This is going to be fun.”

“Wait, I thought you were part of this,” Eli objected, gesturing to Tommy.

“They had just arrived when we left the library,” Dorrek filled in, and the traitor, he was starting to look a lot more amused than concerned.

“We are now,” Tommy shot back, and he reached for the envelope as well.

Eli held it out of his reach. “Give. Me. That!” Bill jumped between them, waving his arms in the air to keep them apart.

“Enough! Okay, fine, you win,” he growled at Kate and Tommy both. “But you have to swear yourselves to total secrecy. That means no newspapers,” he jabbed a finger at Kate, only feeling a little bit guilty for the flash of hurt in her eyes.

“Off the record,” she swore, holding up her right hand as though she were making a deposition.

“Bill,” Dorrek warned, his smile from a moment ago now replaced with something much warier.

Bill met his eyes. “It’ll be okay. Trust me?”

He didn’t look convinced, but Bill barrelled ahead anyway. To hell with it all. Boyne was breathing down his neck and he really didn’t feel like doing this alone anymore. “The long and short of it goes like this. Ted and I planning to break into a top-secret lab at a secure military installation in order to retrieve part—or all—of an alien spaceship that the army recovered from the crash site two nights ago.”

There was a beat of total silence, Kate, Tommy and Eli all trading looks. Dorrek shifted forward onto the balls of his feet.

Then Tommy nodded. “Cool. How many laws are we breaking in the process?”

“At least five.” Bill breathed out a silent sigh of relief. Once again, Tommy came through.

“Try ten or eleven,” Eli corrected him, shaking his head. He folded his arms across his chest, the envelope crinkling in his hand.

“Even better,” Kate replied cheerfully. “We’re in.”

Tommy cocked his head at her. “If this all goes south, your daddy’s lawyers are going to earn the hell out of their retainer.”

“So we don’t get caught.”

“Easier said than done,” Eli objected. “We’re not exactly an inconspicuous group.”

“We?” Dorrek had gone from concerned to puzzled, while Bill only had an overwhelming wave of relief. And maybe a little bit of hesitation considering the specific _combination_ of people involved, but what was that saying about beggars and choosers?

“You don’t have to get involved,” Bill did object, more for form’s sake than anything else. Form and a growing realization that the plan had gone beyond the realm of discussion, now, and he was happily drawing them right into the middle of his problems.

(Except that Kate and Tommy could have easily stayed in New York and not been involved at all. He hadn’t drawn them in, they’d crashed the party. He couldn’t feel guilty about _that_ , could he?)

Reality check: he could feel guilty about a lot of things that weren’t his fault. Park it for now and move on.

“Are you kidding? This is one of the greatest days of my life,” Kate answered gleefully. “How often am I going to get to see an honest-to-God spaceship in my lifetime?”

Eli frowned at her. “Lots, if this is the beginning of an invasion force.”

“It’s not an invasion force,” Dorrek insisted, then promptly shut his mouth.

Tommy and Eli both turned to look at him more carefully. “How do you know that?” Tommy asked.

“If it was an invasion, there’d be more than just one scout by now,” Dorrek suggested, and by now Bill could tell that the subtle shift to blankness in his expression was masking emotion that he was trying really hard not to show. “Especially since it crashed.”

Someone had slowed as they walked past the end of the alley, and Bill caught sight of a face glancing in. “This is probably not the best time to be talking about any of this. Or the best place.” He nodded to the cars. “Back to my apartment?”

That space had been just him and Dorrek for two days now, two days and two horrible, wonderful nights. It would be good to disrupt that, make it a lot harder for Bill to moon around about something that would never happen. Make it a lot harder for him to do something impulsive that he would regret (would he?) for the rest of his life.

For a moment he had the burning urge to call the meeting off right then and there. Lots of people lived with regret.

“War council time,” Kate agreed, nodding. “Will you be joining us, Mr. Bradley?”

Eli hesitated, but only for a second. “Life was getting dull anyway. And someone needs to ride to the rescue when you all end up in handcuffs.”

“Kinky,” Tommy replied, then, “ow!” when Kate stepped on his foot.

“Sorry,” she said, all innocence.

“I need to call out sick and arrange for coverage for the next couple of days,” Eli finished, ignoring the interchange. He handed the envelope to Bill, the paper packet heavier than he’d expected from the look of it. “I’ll come by your place once I’m done here. Don’t do anything dumb without me.”

“Who, us?”

Eli rolled his eyes and headed back inside. Bill swiped his book and map from Tommy, broke from the cluster and unlocked his car, tossing everything in the back seat. Dorrek paused before sliding into the passenger side, and Bill met his eyes over the roof of the car.

“Are you sure about this?” Dorrek asked. “About them?”

“About any of this? Not a chance. About those three people? One hundred percent.” Bill tried to sound confident and cheerful, he figured he’d made it about fifty percent of the way.

Dorrek nodded, not looking particularly convinced. But he got in the car, still watching over his shoulder. “Thank you,” he did say as they pulled into the road.

“For what?”

“For not telling them about me. I know it’ll come out eventually, but the more people that know, the more danger I’m in.”

Bill nodded, resting his hands more easily on the wheel when the main road proved to be empty of obvious FBI sedans. “Someday I want to hear more about that, you know. Who they are, what they want, a full-on lecture on Skrull diplomacy and military history. The stuff that you avoided doing homework for when you were a little… Skrull-ling. Someday Earth will have spaceships of our own and we’re going to run into you again. We should be prepared.”

“It’s not that interesting,” Dorrek objected, a small smile playing over his lips before it vanished again. “And I hope that you never have a reason to need to know any of that.” He looked out the window at the sky, clear and blue and arcing overhead. “The universe is a lot more dangerous than you think.”

He squinted harder, and he frowned up at the sky. His eyes changed in the space of a blink, not the same dark-vision ones that had scared Bill that first night, but something wider, larger. And whatever it was those new eyes showed him was enough to send him jerking back from the window.

“Drive faster, Bill. Someone’s coming in.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gang hit the road, but there's more than one group in hot pursuit...

Even the telescopic lenses of thrim-owl eyes couldn’t make out details on the shimmer in the air, but Dorrek could identify an atmospheric entry any day. Whoever it was had some kind of partial cloak engaged, enough to fool something primitive like the radar dishes at Bill’s observatory. That didn’t narrow it down much. Everyone from the Kree to the Shi’ar had cloaking tech these days.

But there were only a few groups who would have any reason to be near Earth, and all of those—bar one—were bad news for him.

Unfortunately, it seemed incredibly unlikely that Xavin would have any idea where Dorrek was, much less dispatch any kind of rescue mission. He could hear his cousin’s dry, acid commentary in the back of his mind, telling him how much of an idiot he really was for sneaking out, for not taking them with him, for all kinds of things he’d done wrong to end up in his current predicament.

There was a slim chance he and Bill’s friends could pull off this retrieval mission and he’d get to sit in his room back home on Throneworld and listen to Xav tell him off for being a moron.

He was really, really looking forward to that.

But in order to get _there_ , he was going to have to deal with _here_ , and with the blip in the planet’s thermosphere that was speeding towards the horizon.

The vehicle picked up speed as they left the smaller residential streets, Bill’s knuckles going whiter on the wheel. He kept shooting glances at Dorrek, watching him watching the sky, until finally he snapped. “What is it? Who’s coming? Are they following us?”

“It’s a cloaked ship, I have no idea whose, and they just vanished behind the skyline.” Dorrek slumped back in his seat in frustration. “I’m going to guess they’re landing somewhere to the south of town.”

“So what do we do? Fight them? I promised to help you, but I don’t know what we’ve got that can win a fight against aliens. I’m not exactly a trained boxer.”

Dorrek wasn’t sure what a ‘boxer’ was, but at least he could answer the rest. “If it were me? My first stop would be the crash site, then do what we did. Try and track down where the ship was taken. And where the pilot is. Because they’re going to be a lot more interested in me than the ship. It was an older model anyway.”

“The prince of space was flying around in a junk car?” Bill fired back, a flash of a grin on his face lightening the mood for a beat.

“I wasn’t going to swipe one of the fighters,” Dorrek caught himself trying to justify it and shook his head at Bill instead. “It was an old science module, I figured no-one would miss it for a while. I don’t get a lot of time alone or unscheduled, and sometimes-” he let the comment trail off and glanced behind them to see if Bill’s brother and the sharp-eyed Miss Bishop were still following.

They were, or at least a car that looked like theirs was on Bill’s tail.

And on the side of the road, pulled over on the verge, a similar black car and one of the suited men that Bill had identified as government agents leaning against it, writing on a notepad. He looked up at the pair of cars as they sped by. Dorrek only had enough time to register the look of surprise on the agent’s face before they were down the road and around the corner, the agent and his car out of sight behind them.

Enemies chasing them in the sky and on land. It was too bad Earth had no aquatic allied kingdoms to call on for help.

* * *

 

A short while later, Dorrek’s misgivings aside, he found himself once more in Bill’s small apartment, now made to feel even smaller by the presence of Bill’s clutchmate and two friends. They’d taken over the couch Dorrek had been sleeping on, blinds open and conversation filling all the silences.

The letters Eli had given to Bill were hand-written, much to Dorrek’s surprise and alarm. As much as he had been able to decode from the typewritten news papers that were delivered to Bill’s apartment, the shapes of the letters in handwriting were different and all wrong. He frowned at the sheet of paper in his hand, the tight, cramped and illegible curlicues that marched in ordered lines across the page making no sense to him at all.

The man he was pretending to be would have had no problem reading them. Offering to make beverages for the group, on the other hand, got him out of having to sit at the low table and pretend that he understood. He did that instead.

Assuming he could figure out the coffee machine. But he could repair a faster-than-light engine and field-strip an energy blaster; how hard could a _drink dispenser_ actually be?

By the time he’d finally figured out which part was meant to hold the water and how it got in there—where the water came from was easier, since the tap in the kitchen sink was similar enough to the ones in the shower that he only got sprayed once—Kate was watching him with a little smile playing on her lips, making no move to get up and help him.

Bill was on the phone.

Dorrek stopped puzzling over the canister of ground black powder that smelled very much like the drink Bill had pressed into his hands that morning, and dumped in as much as the small steel basket would hold.

“What kind of questions are they asking?” Bill stopped pacing and listened intently for a minute, his fingers twisting in the cord that connected the handset to the device on the table. “They showed up when?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Do you have any idea what he’s telling them?”

“No. I’m taking a couple of days to go over some of Ted’s data,” Bill lied, meeting Dorrek’s eyes across the room. A frown had settled in the furrow between his brows. “And I’ve got some family visiting. If he asks, tell Nate… tell him I’ll be back by Friday.”

Bill yanked the phone receiver away from his ear and even from the kitchen Dorrek could hear the outrage in the tinny voice coming through the speaker.

“No, I know you’re not a secretary,” Bill pleaded, and Kate fell back into the couch cushions laughing. “Please? As a friend, a _colleague._ Yes,” he vowed earnestly. “I absolutely owe you one. Two, even.”

He puffed out a breath as he hung up, looking hunted.

“What’s going on?” Dorrek prompted, and he turned the dial on the coffee machine to try and make it start up. There was a little red disc that looked like it should be an indicator light, but the light stayed dark.

“The FBI showed up at the observatory this morning,” Bill explained, pacing circle widened now that he wasn’t attached to the telephone anymore. “They started asking questions. And then not long after they left, a second group showed up. Cassie says they’ve been in Nate’s office for hours now.”

“Second group?” Eli set down the pages he was leafing through, the notepad beside him covered in more of those illegible curls of writing. “You mean not FBI.”

“Cassie didn’t seem to think so.”

“What other agency would be interested in something like this?” Kate frowned, tapping her pen against her knee. “The OSS?”

“Aren’t they the CIG now?” Tommy corrected her, and she turned her frown at him.

Eli stared at Dorrek for a second, dark eyes sharp and piercing. “That disbanded a couple of months ago. There’s a new one now – two new ones. The Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council. But they’re supposed to be keeping tabs on Axis countries, not extraterrestrial life. Any ideas, Ted?”

Dorrek shrugged; thankfully he didn’t have to pretend to play dumb about the topic. All the names they were throwing around were meaningless. “I’m not your guy when it comes to intelligence agencies. I can’t even get the coffee pot to work.”

Bill joined him in the kitchen, looked down, grabbed the machine’s tail and shoved it into a set of holes in the wall. The light turned on and the machine started to creak and grumble.

“Ah.”

“They might not be ours.” Tommy tapped the papers in his hand into a neater pile, fingers drumming on the edges of the pages. “What are the Russians up to right now?”

“Something other than watching New Mexico, I hope.”

In the kitchen, Dorrek was painfully aware of Bill’s nearness, the nervous agitation that kept him in near-constant motion, the way their smallest fingers accidentally brushed when Bill braced his hands on the counter.

And the way he was watching Dorrek, a question in his eyes. “Sure they’re not yours?” he said quietly under the sound of the coffee pot burbling and choking on steam.

Dorrek thought back to the ship he’d seen—could someone have figured out his movements so quickly? The ship had an emergency beacon, but he hadn’t had the chance to turn it on during the crash and chaotic aftermath. “It’s possible,” he said quietly.

“Time to get moving,” Tommy announced, standing. “We can finish looking through the rest of these on the road. But if there are other governments chasing this thing down, then our best bet is to be as far away from ground zero as possible, as quickly as possible.”

The coffee pot rattled alarmingly, but Bill didn’t bat an eye. “What’s the plan? All five of us in your car and leave mine here?”

Kate grinned. “Leave yours by the air strip, it’ll make them insane trying to figure out where you went.”

“Sounds like a plan, little brother. Pack your undershorts and let’s get a move on.” Tommy shoved the pages in his hand back into the envelope and passed it to Eli who did the same.

The pot at Dorrek’s elbow began to emit a high-pitched whine that finally caught Bill’s attention.

He dove for the cord and yanked it from the wall as a tidal wave of boiling brown sludge bubbled over the top and sprayed across the counter.

Bill yelped. Dorrek ducked out of range and pulled Bill with him.

The lid hit the floor, clattering to a stop.

They watched in mournful silence as the pungent geyser sputtered to a halt.

The pot settled.

It _blorp_ ed once, mournfully, then went quiet.

“How much did you put in there?” Eli asked accusingly.

Dorrek winced. “As much as would fit in the little… basket… thing.” He trailed off, Kate’s groan and Tommy’s laugh cutting him short. “Not right?”

“Really not.”

“You.” Bill rounded on Dorrek and jabbed him in the chest with one finger, his eyes narrowed. “Are off coffee duty. _Forever_.”

Why did that make Dorrek feel… sad, somehow? It wasn’t as though there had ever been a chance he was going to be sticking around on the planet long enough to learn how in the first place.

“Tom and Eli will get this cleaned up, you two go pack whatever you need for the road trip.” Kate waved them off, and Eli’s jaw set, stubborn. _Ah_ , thought Dorrek, with a sudden burst of clarity.

He didn’t have anything to pack, not really, but folded the sleep wear that Bill had loaned him while the bickering picked up steam in the background.

“Why are we on cleanup duty when it was Ted’s fault?”

“I think she likes Teddy-boy over there better than us, Bradley.”

“I’m certainly considering it.”

“You’re cruel, Katie. Right through the heart, that one went.”

It should have been annoying, their presence one more obstacle in his way. But even as Dorrek slung the small bag over his arm and prepared to leave Bill’s apartment for what was probably the last time, he found himself smiling.

* * *

 

Dorrek seemed more relaxed as they headed out, even though Bill’s nerves were ramping up to high gear. Probably because they were finally going to do something to get him closer to his ship. But what was a little more screaming in his brain? The last few days had been keeping him in fight-or-flight so much that he was starting to adjust to it as a regular state of being. Hooray?

Bill couldn’t help watching over his shoulder as he shooed Tommy, Kate and Eli out the apartment door and down the stairs. Old lady Dorsey’s door cracked open as they clattered past and Bill caught sight of one suspicious eye peering out at him from behind the chain. He waved as cheerfully as he could muster — _I see you too, you nosy old bat_ — and she slammed the door.

Great. One more person who knew that something out of the ordinary was up.

“What’s the official plan?” Tommy was asking Kate, but it was Eli who answered.

“Bill drives to the airstrip on local roads, makes sure he’s seen. We go around by the highway, pick him up after he’s ditched his car, and head for Fort Worth.”

“If they impound my car, you’re paying the towing fees,” Bill grumbled, his satchel full of clothes bumping hard against his leg.

Naturally, they ignored him. “We should make the local mouth-breathers’ heads explode,” Kate said to Eli, a challenge and a grin in her voice. “You get in the back and _I’ll_ drive.”

“Sure, if we want to be pulled over and shot on sight.” Tommy grabbed the door and held it open for all of them. “When I’m the voice of reason you know this world’s a disaster.”

“No argument here.”

“Guys?” Kate paused in the doorway, hand up to signal a halt. “We’ve got company. Black cars, no plates. I’m going to assume they’re here for you.”

Bill scanned the parking lot, but the first car just pulling in was already familiar. Boyne, it had to be. The agent just didn’t know when to quit. Bill picked up the pace, trying to keep the walk across the lot casual and fast at the same time.

“Here we go,” Eli muttered, keeping pace with Bill, his eyes flickering over to the black cars as well. “Meet you at the airstrip.”

“Doctor Kaplan!” Boyne called, leaning out the window of his car. “A moment, if you please.”

Bill ignored him and dove for the driver’s side door of his car, jamming the key into the lock.

Dorrek broke off from the pack, sliding into the passenger side the second Bill got the doors unlocked.

“You aren’t going with them?” Bill asked, but there wasn’t time to argue — he had to start the engine, a couple of men in black suits starting to climb out of the second official-looking car.

“If things go wrong at the airstrip, you’ll need backup,” Dorrek replied, and on the surface it sounded perfectly reasonable. Bill really shouldn’t be spending emotional energy hoping that it meant something more.

The car started and he breathed an internal sigh of relief. “Nothing’s going to go wrong,” he replied, throwing the car into reverse. He skidded out of the parking spot, the FBI agent in the lead jumping out of the way to avoid being run over, and peeled out of the lot. Boyne shouted something, the words lost in the screech of tires.

Tommy’s rental car followed suit, Eli behind the wheel, splitting off at the first corner and vanishing down the highway.

“Nothing’s going to go wrong,” Bill repeated under his breath. He gunned the old car’s engine, shifting into higher gear. Hopefully this time the universe would hear him and know that he meant it.

* * *

 

Mostly deserted, the airstrip had the look of a ghost town. Bill pulled in to a parking space that he hoped looked as ‘trying to be inconspicuous, definitely don’t want you to see this’ as possible. Was there a proper spot for nonchalant parking? He pulled out and back in on a slightly more rakish angle, just to be on the safe side.

“Okay,” he breathed out, when no-one appeared in the building door to challenge them, the handful of cars and planes there entirely unoccupied by government agents. “We’re good. Now all we have to do is get to the highway turnoff and wait for our ride.”

Dorrek nodded, halfway out of the car before he stopped, slid back in, and leveled a solemn look at Bill. The sun caught him at an angle, casting one side of his face in shadow, the other glowing in the warm golden light. “Before things get crazy-”

“Too late,” Bill snorted, and Dorrek smiled.

“You’ve done a lot more to help me than most people would,” Dorrek replied, his voice gentle and serious. “And I want you to know how much I appreciate it.”

And for a moment, Bill saw what Dorrek’s people probably saw when they looked at him. Not a man, as scared and vulnerable as Bill, but a compassionate and proud leader, the weight of a galaxy carried on those broad shoulders.

He swallowed, some unnamed heaviness settling thick in his chest. And he nodded, unable to trust his voice in that moment. “Any time,” he did get out, drowning in the intense blue of Prince Dorrek’s eyes.

“There’s a religious leader, from a long time ago. And he said… I can’t remember exactly how it goes, but it was something like ‘if I am only for myself, then what am I?’ It’s part of a lesson about how we’re supposed to help people who need it. So…” he flailed a hand in the air, the intensity of the moment not dissipating no matter how awkwardly he acted. “Here I am. Helping.”

Dorrek seemed to be pondering that as they walked to the turnoff in silence, the air thick with unsaid things. “It’s not a bad philosophy. Your religious leaders sound sensible.” He folded his arms across his chest and leaned against a tree, positioned so he could see the road.

“Yeah,” Bill muttered. “Some of the time, anyway.” Thinking about that too much led down the path of thinking about the war, and the things that had happened in it, the combined agony of a people crying out to a God that hadn’t answered-

Before he had to say anything or explain the sudden black mood that Dorrek had surely seen envelop him, Bill heard wheels crunching on gravel. He backed up into the shade of the tree, bumping into something a lot warmer than the trunk and just as solid.

“Careful,” Dorrek murmured low, his broad hand steadying under Bill’s elbow. They stood so close as they listened for the car, engine noises coming closer. Bill’s back burned, barely a hair’s width of distance between him and Dorrek’s chest.

Had he always been that warm and Bill had just never noticed? He smelled like Bill’s soap and shampoo but _better,_ his own scent an intoxicating underlay beneath the hints of pine and too-strong coffee.

The car came around the corner and Bill’s paralysis broke, the sight of Eli through the window glass all kinds of wonderful-horrible. He took off for the car at a fast clip, only pausing briefly when Dorrek took a moment to follow.

“Were we late?” Kate asking as he slid in the back to join her and Tommy, leaving the seat in the front for Dorrek.

“No, believe me,” Bill replied, too enthusiastically. He sagged back against the car’s smooth cushioned seat, his skin still tingling. What could have happened if they’d had more time? It would have been so easy to lean back just that little bit more, expose his neck to Dorrek’s mouth, feel that sculpted-stone chest with his own bare hands.

But then what? Get yelled at? Called a freak of a human — or worse?

Yeah, there was worse: get a very polite rejection, framed in the kindest possible way, confirming that nothing would ever happen. And that once Dorrek had blasted back off into outer space, Bill would never hear from or about him again.

Bill pressed his lips together at the thought, even as Dorrek turned that angel-golden head of his to look into the back seat. Bill carefully didn’t meet his eyes. “You were just in time.”

* * *

 

“So how long is this trip anyway?”

“Taking it at sixty miles an hour? About seven hours.”

“And the way you drive?”

“Closer to six.”

* * *

 

Just past Tatum, Kate pulled the stack of letters out of her purse and started distributing them to the other non-drivers in the car. Leaning forward, she tapped the edges of a pile against Dorrek’s shoulder. “Here — read through these and see if there’s anything useful.”

Dorrek shrugged apologetically, holding up the unfolded road map. “Can’t do it — I’m navigator.”

“I’d believe that more if you weren’t holding the map upside down.”

* * *

 

“Sixty-eight bottles of beer on the wall-”

“Billy, if you don’t muzzle your brother, I’m going to make Eli leave him at the next road stop.”

“You’re the one who decided to bring him. He’s your problem.”

“You both love me, you’re just afraid to admit it. Sixty-seven bottles-”

“That’s it, pull over. We’re about to have an intervention.”

* * *

 

The sun was on its way down toward the horizon by the time they crossed through Abilene. Eli pulled a small, green-covered book out of the glove compartment, gave Dorrek another one of his suspicious looks, then tossed it back over his shoulder to Bill. “Find somewhere in there for us to stay the night, will you?”

Kate handed her notebook to Tommy and started digging through her purse again, coming up with a slim gold band. She slipped it on her ring finger, left hand.

“What’s that for?” Dorrek asked, looking back at her with a faintly baffled expression.

“Fake wedding band,” she replied breezily. “Meet Mrs. Shepherd. I have it to keep the creeps away when I’m interviewing for a story.”

Eli cocked an eyebrow at her in the rear-view mirror, navigating deftly through what passed for small-town traffic. “Does it work?”

She made a face. “Sometimes. Not often enough. Some guys are just desperate for any kind of attention,” she added, nudging Tommy in the ribs.

He ignored it, stretching his arm across the back of her seat and grinning.

“Why Mrs. Shepherd?” Bill asked, grabbing the opportunity to get Tommy back, at least a little. “That’s a hell of a step down the social ladder.”

Kate laughed and Tommy pretended to look offended.

“As much fun as it would be to be Mrs. Bradley,” Kate replied, all sugar-sweet, “we’re in Texas and that’ll get us all killed.”

“Fair,” Eli grudgingly admitted from the driver’s seat.

“And I’m not going to jump from one brother to another, sorry Bill. I’ll stick with the devil I know.”

He had to appreciate her discretion, considering the other answer she could have given. But the way she narrowed her eyes, smiled and immediately focused on Dorrek made Bill’s back tense right up.

“How about you, Ted? On the hunt for a _Mrs_. Theodore Dorrek?”

Bill braced for- for what, he wasn’t quite sure, but Dorrek was already playing with fire by asking so many questions. Any second now someone was going to guess that he wasn’t who he said he was.

But Dorrek only looked startled, then sheepish, and shook his head. “… Not at the moment, no. But thanks.”

The smile that Kate turned on Bill was nothing short of knowing and triumphant, and he resisted the overwhelming urge to sink his head into his hands. Only… maybe, if he kept her on _that_ track instead of another, he could keep her investigative reporting instincts at bay.

He only needed another day.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  The actual quote Bill is misremembering is from Rabbi Hillel, from Ethics of the Fathers, 1:14, written in the early 3rd century CE. "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?"


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Plans get made, and then plans get rapidly changed. It's not the green men that the gang needs to watch out for.

“I’m not sure I understand why Eli can’t stay at the same place we do,” Dorrek asked Bill quietly after Eli dropped them off at the door of the long single-story building. A sign saying _MOTEL_ flashed behind them. Tommy and Kate moved ahead into the lobby of the building, and Bill watched them with what looked like trepidation. Was he nervous about what his brother might do if Dorrek’s secrets were revealed?

Maybe he didn’t trust his clutchmate as much as he’d claimed.

“It’s complicated and awful,” Bill sighed, looking away from his brother and shaking his head.

“The skin colour issue again,” Dorrek guessed belatedly, and Bill only had to nod in response.

“Places that will rent to him won’t be happy about us; it would cause a huge amount of trouble if we tried. And motels that serve a white client base won’t let him stay there at all. But at least Fort Worth isn’t a sundown town. There are a couple of places in his book where he can stay, and he’ll meet up with us later.”

Dorrek wasn’t sure what a ‘sundown town’ was, but he got the general idea. “Is it-”

He never got to finish that question, following Bill into the low-lit vestibule. The warm brown carpet was clean, the acrid smell of chemicals and fresh pigment leeching from the walls. The humans in the room didn’t seem to be able to smell it, or at least they weren’t reacting to it, the newness and fresh décor giving the place an otherwise airy, friendly atmosphere.

Kate was leaning on the counter talking to the older woman behind it, making sure that the ring on her hand was catching the light. Bill looked over, his face actually went a little pale, and he hurried towards the conversation while muttering under his breath.

“Three rooms,” Dorrek heard Bill insist as he caught up to the others at the counter. Tommy’s gaze went to _Dorrek_ for some reason, but Kate’s smile was smug.

“They’ve only got two that will do,” she announced cheerfully, and the woman behind the counter narrowed her eyes at Kate with a certain amount of suspicion. “Oh shucks. But Ted’s been staying at your apartment already, Bill. Surely you won’t mind sharing a room with your houseguest for one more night.”

“Sure, and he’s probably already sick of my company,” Bill argued, eyes darting back to Dorrek in a gesture that almost looked guilty. “Give the guy a break.”

“I’m not, honestly,” Dorrek said quickly, before Kate could take Bill’s objections to heart. Any extra arguments meant more time for the landlady to learn their appearances and mannerisms. Anything out of the ordinary meant one more thing that might stick even more firmly in her memory once the hunters traced them to the motel. “It’s been a long day, and all I really want is a chance to shower and stretch my legs.”

Oh, that was interesting—and not at all unwelcome. The moment he’d said ‘shower’ Bill had turned a faint shade of pink. He’d wondered, after Bill had pulled away from him at the air strip, but it seemed like that attraction that had hummed between them was still very much in place.

And Dorrek was suddenly much more invested in getting that shared room. He didn’t fully understand human mating rituals, but where there was interest, there was bound to be a way.

His better judgement caught him, though.

_Focus, hatchling._

Attraction was a distraction, pulling him away from his real purpose—getting his ship, getting home, and informing his grandfather of the attack on his life. The landlady was watching them, and who knew what suspicions were brewing in her mind?

“We could-” Bill started, but Dorrek shook his head.

“Whatever’s easiest,” he said firmly, in a tone just shy of a command. It wasn’t mental suggestion _per se_ , but it seemed even humans were programmed to respond to someone who sounded like they were in charge.

Tommy gave him a sidelong, measuring glance as they headed down the hallway a few minutes later, keys in hand. “Nice mom-voice,” he said in a tone of voice that sounded like a joke. It took Dorrek a second too long to parse that out, and then another beat to frantically search his memory for something Bill had said that seemed like it would fit-

“Wrangling undergrads,” Dorrek said, trying hard to sound knowing and world-weary, even if he was only partially clear on what an ‘undergrad’ actually was.

“Oh yeah?” Tommy asked, and Dorrek tensed. “What classes do you-”

“Come on,” Bill marched past them, unlocking the door to the room he and Dorrek were now going to be sharing. “You said you wanted a shower, right? Better grab it before Tommy uses up all the hot water in the system.”

Reprieve!

“Says the man with more hair products than Kate.” Tommy dropped the line of enquiry, seizing the chance to tease his brother instead.

“I do not,” Bill insisted, and Dorrek took the opportunity left open by the twins’ squabbling to slip into the room and out of Tommy’s line of sight.

The room was small, about the same size as the central living space in Bill’s apartment, with a bathroom off to one side in an enclosed alcove. Two beds sat side by side, separated only by a small table with a clock and a lamp sitting on top. At least it looked clean and reasonably comfortable, the warm tones of the floor covering mirrored in the browns and golds of the bedding and the curtains.

The door closed behind him, Bill’s head thudding back against it. He sighed heavily, his eyes shut and shoulders squared.

Whatever he was feeling in that moment, it looked neither ‘safe’ nor ‘relaxed.’

“Thanks for the save,” Dorrek offered, words falling heavily into the silence settling over the room.

Bill’s lips pressed together. He heaved himself off the door and shook his head. “Don’t mention it.” He tossed his jacket and his bag on the nearest of the two beds and dug into the overnight case, looking for something. “I’m actually going to grab the shower first. Do me a favour and stay out of trouble,” he added, eyes rising to meet Dorrek’s again.

Tired. Tired and sad about something, that was what Dorrek saw there, and he couldn’t begin to explain why.

“I’ll try,” he did reply dryly, folding his arms across his chest. Bill’s gaze dropped to them for an instant before flickering upward again. “Though given the circumstances, that may prove difficult.”

“Just… don’t pull that alien-king ‘he who must be obeyed’ crap again, alright?” Bill pulled his towel out of his bag and tossed it over his shoulder. It settled there like a terrycloth cape, draping down along his arm. “At least not on me.”

He turned and headed into the bathing room, closing the door behind him with a firm click.

Dorrek stood there for a minute longer, only until he heard the water turn on. Bill’s jacket pockets gave up a couple of pieces of the local metal currency, hopefully enough to buy himself one of the news bulletins he’d seen on the table in the front lobby. Out and back, and then settle in to muddle his way through the unfamiliar language and try and glean something new that might be useful tomorrow.

His last day on the planet, assuming all went well.

* * *

Bill slipped out of the room, closing the door on the sound of the running shower. After the last two days, he was the mental and emotional equivalent of a wrung-out dishcloth.

Sitting in the room when Dorrek came out of the bathroom (naked again? Oh God.) would have been the worst (best) possible thing he could have done if he wanted to keep even his current tenuous hold on his sanity. So he bailed out instead.

Eli had already snuck in the back way and had claimed the armchair in Tommy and Kate’s room, the three of them in the middle of a heated discussion that cut short when Bill opened the door. He paused at the threshold, hand on the doorknob, blinking bemusedly at the sudden silence—one that lasted just long enough for Eli to crane his neck and realize that Bill was alone.

“Come in, pull up some floor,” Tommy invited him in, wry amusement curling at the edges of his voice. “Eli was just explaining how we’re all idiots.”

“I didn’t say ‘idiot,’ I said ‘dangerously naïve,’” Eli corrected. “And I stand by that assessment. We can’t bring him with us tomorrow.”

“Bring who?” Bill kicked off his shoes and sat on one of the twin beds instead, bumping his shoulder against Kate’s in an unspoken greeting. “You’re not leaving me behind, I can promise you that. This is my mission.”

Eli shook his head. “Not you, the guy you’re dragging around with you. There’s no way we can take him on base with us. If he sees us do something illegal? It’s too risky.”

“You’re being way too overprotective,” Kate bumped Bill back, leaning back on her elbows to watch the conversation. “So what if he does? He knew what he was getting into when he came along for the ride.”

Tommy cocked his head, his brow furrowing as he looked back and forth between Eli and Bill. “Why don’t we like Ted? If Billy vouched for him, that’s enough for me. Even if he is-”

“See?” Eli stabbed the air with his finger. “Even Tom’s caught on.”

Tommy looked put-out. “What do you mean ‘even Tom’?”

“That doesn’t change things,” Kate shook her head.

“Can someone please tell me what we’re talking about here?” Bill pleaded, the worst coming immediately to mind. They’d figured out Dorrek’s secret already, that had to be it. They already knew that he was-

“That your friend Ted is an FBI plant!” Eli half-rose out of the chair as he proclaimed it, at the same time Kate said—

“That he’s Billy’s lover, of course.”

“Wait, what-?”

“-he’s who?”

“Billy actually got some play?”

“Oh God,” Bill groaned, sinking his head into his hands. “No. Just… no. None of the above. He’s not- and we’re _definitely_ not-”

Kate sat up and poked him in the ribs. Bill shied away from her fingers, and she grinned when he had to lift his head up to do it. “ _Why_ not? There’s chemistry there, don’t deny it.”

“It’s not that easy!” Bill spluttered, glaring at her. “Come on. You know that.”

Eli frowned at them both, Bill’s careful glance confirming the worst. He’d never explicitly _said_ anything to Eli about his… bachelor lifestyle… but he’d kind of assumed that Eli knew, and now-

Now Eli looked like he’d had bad news. Bill held his breath when Eli opened his mouth to speak.

“… So you’re saying he _could_ still be a government agent.”

“What? No! Ted’s-” He kind of was, though, except not an American one like Eli was assuming. Or a Russian, or German one, either. And the kind of governmental representative that Dorrek _was_ … wasn’t for Bill to disclose. “You’re just going to have to trust me on this one,” Bill finished instead, trying to sound as firm as he could.

_Because you wouldn’t believe me even if I explained it to you._

“I’ll tell you what he isn’t,” Tommy flung himself onto the empty bed between Bill and Eli, locking his hands behind his head. “He sure as hell isn’t just some California grad student. He thought Fresno was a kind of soft drink.”

“You _were_ testing him,” Bill accused, stabbing his finger at his brother as his indignation rose. “What the hell?”

“And you’re not going to tell us what he’s really here for?” Kate asked, dragging the conversation away from the twin-fight Bill was suddenly itching for.

He sighed instead, letting his anger go. “If I say that he’s an expert in the kind of tech we’re retrieving, and we need him with us tomorrow, will that be enough to make you trust me?”

“Not-” Eli began, and Kate squished her fingers together in his direction as a ‘zip-it’ sort of gesture.

“Ideally not, but do we have a choice?” Eli finished instead, glowering at Kate.

“Not if we want to pull this off.”

“Speaking of which, oh fearless leaders,” Tommy interjected from the bed, his pointed look at Bill a very familiar ‘this isn’t over’ signal that meant Bill was going to get it from his twin later. Fine. Later they could all be arrested or blown up by alien laser guns, so he was more than willing to put off the reckoning until that hypothetical time. “What’s the plan? We can’t just walk up to the front gate of a military base and ask nicely.”

Eli smiled at that one, his glower slipping away. “Actually, that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

“Come again?”

“He’s right,” Kate replied, and a flash of pleased surprise appeared on Eli’s face for a moment before it was gone again. “We can’t break in—we’d be caught and arrested immediately. So it’s ‘clipboard and a smile’ time.

“If you look like you belong and act like you know what you’re doing, a lot fewer people are going to question it. If we can scrounge up a couple of uniforms before tomorrow, maybe a lab coat or two, so much the better.”

“And where are we going to get those?” Bill objected, then… right. Of course, he had a way to get precisely one. “On second thought, I think I know where I can get my hands on one that will fit D- _Ted_. The rest of us will have to make do with science drag.”

“That’s fine with me. Kate can be your loyal secretary,” Tommy teased, ducking out of the way and rolling off the other side of the bed just fast enough to evade the pillow that Kate hurled at his head.

“Speaking of which,” Bill muttered, mostly to himself. “I need to call Cass,” he said louder, and stood up. “There was some weirdness at the lab today, and I want to check in. We’ll meet for seven tomorrow?”

“Seven in the _morning?_ ” Tommy echoed forlornly from the floor. “That’s inhuman.”

“Seven is fine.” That came from Eli, who showed no signs of getting up to go. The moment Bill stepped out of the room, Eli, Tommy and Kate were going to be dissecting every nuance of Bill and Dorrek’s interactions from the past twenty hours.

Fine. Let them have their fun.

“I’ll see you then,” Bill confirmed, leaving the room and closing the door behind him before anyone could stop him or worse—ask more questions. Which left him with only one place to go.

Back to his room down the hall, where Dorrek, Prince of the Andromeda Galaxy, was probably sprawled out half-naked on the bed.

_He’s Billy’s lover, of course!_

The phone was in the lobby. Maybe, if he took long enough on the call, Dorrek would be asleep by the time Bill got back to the room and the entire conversation could be avoided. It was a fool’s hope, but he hung on to it for as long as he possibly could.

* * *

 

Bill hesitated before pushing open the motel room door. No sound came from the other side, not even the radio or television news, and there wasn’t any light showing under the door. Had Dorrek already turned in for the night? The hard knot in Billy’s gut softened at the thought. He probably had; the poor guy had to be exhausted, both physically and mentally. The strain Bill was under from all the secret-keeping and running around was nothing compared to what Dorrek was living through, and all of it on a planet he barely understood.

No, he deserved a chance for a good night’s rest, and to not have to worry about Bill’s emotions along with everything else. Bill would go in, change quietly, and not disturb him.

There was no-one in the dark room when Bill stepped inside. At least not that he could see at first, the streetlights outside barely making it in through the long curtains covering the windows.

One of the shadows detached from the corner, the curtain swaying with the motion.

Bill yelped even as his eyes adjusted to the dark and he recognized the by-now familiar silhouette. “You scared me,” he said unnecessarily, his heart pounding.

“Shh.” Dorrek put his finger to his lips and beckoned Bill over to the window. “I don’t think they’ve got sonic scanners,” he murmured as Bill got close, “but you never know.”

“Sonic scanners?” Bill caught himself soon enough to keep his voice down, but Dorrek didn’t answer right away. He drew the edge of the curtain back so that Bill could see out, and didn’t move. Bill had to duck under his arm to see, his shoulder ending up pressed against the solid wall of Dorrek’s chest. The faint tang of the motel soap lay over Dorrek’s usual scent, crisp and elusive.

_Focus._

It didn’t take him long to figure out what Dorrek had been watching.

Not what—who.

They strode along the quiet late-night street oblivious to how much they stuck out, blue skin mostly covered by gleaming armoured plates. He couldn’t identify the machinery in their hands, but from the way they were holding on he had no doubt that they were weapons.

Weapons like Dorrek’s blaster, capable of God knew what kind of damage.

He counted three, no… four of the aliens outside, impossible to tell whether they were male or female from the brief glimpses of detail he got when one or another passed under a light. The one in the lead had a device in their hand that they were using like a Geiger counter, slowly sweeping it back and forth as though looking for something.

Dorrek held stone-still, and if his heart was where Bill thought it was, then that faint thumping had to be it racing. His breath settled warm on the back of Bill’s neck, and Bill’s timing was the absolute _worst_ , because something big was going on and all he could think about was the man leaning ever-so-slightly into his back.

“Who are they?” Bill murmured, and Dorrek let the curtain fall.

“Kree.”

“Isn’t that—your father’s people? Did he send them to find you?” It didn’t seem to fit everything else Dorrek had told him, but there was a lot of ground they hadn’t covered in the handful of days since the crash.

Dorrek shook his head. Bill felt the movement rather than saw it, only belatedly realizing that he was still standing with his back against Dorrek’s chest, staring at a closed curtain and a blank wall. Without an excuse to stay where he was, he reluctantly turned to look Dorrek in the eye instead. “Not these ones.” His eyes flickered to the closed curtain, then back to Bill.

“I don’t know exactly who they are, but the symbol on their pauldrons is connected to an old resistance group,” Dorrek replied, a frown etched into his brow. “They weren’t happy about the end of the wars, or the peace treaties with the Shi’ar. They’re not too big on Skrulls or pink-skinned Kree, either.”

He reached out and flicked the curtain aside again.

“Do you think they were the ones who shot you down?”

Bill didn’t see what the movement was that caught Dorrek’s attention, nothing but a blur in his peripheral vision, but Dorrek dropped the curtain and headed for the beds, the cold air rushing in to fill the void where his body had been.

“The last thing I heard before I crashed was ‘death to the Skrull conquerors,’” he replied dryly, as though Bill should have known that. As he talked he pulled his blaster out of the bag Bill had loaned him, tucking it into his waistband beneath his suit jacket. “The likelihood seems high. We have to get out of here. Now.”

* * *

 

Dorrek hadn’t gone with Bill to his clutchmate’s room but it wasn’t hard to find the way. Bill only hesitated for a moment before he was behind Dorrek, his footsteps sure and growing in confidence as they moved down the hall. “You’re not telling me everything,” Bill prodded. “What kinds of weapons were those? Was that a scanner? Can they somehow pick up your body signature? You’re not radioactive, are you?”

“I’m not radioactive,” Dorrek promised sincerely, and turned the handle of the door to Tom and Kate’s room.

“-sure how you can trust-” Eli’s words cut off short when Dorrek pushed open the door. He half-rose out of the chair on the far side of the room when he saw Dorrek, his face registering a new kind of alarm.

“We need to go,” Dorrek informed them, not wasting time on the usual pleasantries. “Right now.”

“What? Why?” Tom asked, pushing himself up to sitting. “Billy? What’s going on?”

Bill ducked under Dorrek’s arm and stepped into the room, and something about the tight set of his jaw, or maybe the tension in his body, communicated itself to his friends better than Dorrek’s command. “He’s serious. Grab your stuff, we gotta go. I’ll explain once we’re out of here.”

Tom rolled to his feet and Kate grabbed her still-packed bag, but Eli stood his ground and folded his arms. “Explain now,” he suggested, his brow lowering. “I’m not charging out of here without knowing what I’m running away from—or into.”

That gave Dorrek pause, and his respect for Eli (along with a little bit of frustration) kicked up a notch or two. “If I say ‘bad guys, looking for me,’ will that be enough to get us out of the building?” he asked, letting go of the ‘heir to the throne’ attitude. At least for the moment.

“Bad guys?” Tom snorted. “What is this, a Flash Gordon serial? You guys watch too many movies.”

“Don’t be a jerk. I’ll show you exactly what we’re talking about, and then you’ll get it.” Bill marched across the room, shoulders up around his ears and his jaw set, and tugged the curtain over the window back an inch or two to expose the street outside. “See?”

Dorrek had time to exclaim “no, don’t!” before Bill exposed them, but not nearly enough time to get across the room and stop him from doing it.

Eli looked out the window, but he didn’t seem any more convinced than before. “It’s an empty street, Bill. I don’t know what you want me to say I see out there, but it’s just parked cars and a stray dog.”

“They were there! Four of them, weird looking, in some kind of… of _power armour_ ,” Bill insisted, as Tom and Kate moved to take Eli’s place and peer out the window as well.

“No offense, little brother, but I think you need to go lie down before you hurt yourself.”

“I’m gonna hurt someone in a minute, that’s for sure-”

“You’re going off the rails, Bill. Is there even a spaceship at that army base, or are you completely delusional?

“Stay out of this, Eli.”

“Guys?”

They ignored Kate, the two almost-identical sets of features nose to nose and bickering, Eli throwing verbal fuel onto the fire.

“Guys. Now.” Kate’s voice sliced through the argument and they fell silent. She was staring out the window from the side, her hand curled tightly around the curtain, colour rushing to her cheeks. “Alien.”

Dorrek caught a glimpse before the other three rushed to cram into the small space in the corner to get a look. It was one of the big enforcers, a blue-skinned Kree male wider than Dorrek in the shoulders and at least a head taller, his power armour scarred and seared with the remnants of blaster fire and past battles. The energy cannon he carried over one shoulder was no joke, though Dorrek seriously doubted that any of the others in the room could even begin to guess at the firepower it contained.

“Now can we go?” Dorrek asked, impatience getting the better of him.

“Yup.” Kate hopped on one foot as she jammed her shoe back on the other. “I’m sold. But I swear to God, Ted, if I don’t get the exclusive after this, I’ll feed you to the ‘bad guys’ myself.”

“Worry about it later, now it’s time to go,” Bill urged, shooing them out of the room.

Eli hesitated, his reluctance obvious. “Aliens. Holy shit. But how do we know what side you’re actually on?” he asked Dorrek, his eyes narrowing with suspicion.

“I know you have no reason to trust me. But I’m asking you to. For your sake as well as mine.” Dorrek held the door open, waiting. And hoping. Any minute now, the patrol was going to figure out where he was, and that would be followed by a lot more danger than anything they would face from Earth’s military.

Eli’s face went through a rapid series of expressions, but a beat later he threw his hands up in the air, muttered something that sounded an awful lot like ‘what the fuck,’ and followed Bill out through the open door.

The others were already ahead of him by the time Dorrek started down the hallway, turning for the main doors. “Not that way! They’ll see us if we leave by that door.”

Eli jogged ahead and pushed open a door labelled ‘emergency exit.’ “I came in the back. This leads outside.”

“That’ll do!”

Kate broke away from the pack. A moment later Dorrek heard the sound of breaking glass, and a moment after _that_ , an unholy clanging and ringing sound that made his eardrums vibrate.

“What is that?” he shouted over the noise as Bill hauled him outside.

“Fire alarm! It’ll make everyone else in the building evacuate. It’s faster than knocking on all the doors!”

They tumbled out into the night air, the sultry summer heat barely eased by nightfall. Dorrek’s eyes adjusted to the dark automatically, and he led the way through the back alley and the big metal waste bins, and out to the street behind.

“The car is that way,” Eli insisted, pointing back at the parking lot. “We get that, we’ll be moving a hell of a lot faster than on foot.”

“We can’t go back that way, they’ll see us!” Bill objected, still moving towards the line of trees that acted as a privacy screen between the motel and the housing estate on the other side of the street.

“They’ll see us for sure if we’re running around like idiots on foot. Not to mention the local cops. Blue face paint or not, I’m more concerned about them than I am about evil spacemen.”

Bill’s friends, Dorrek was beginning to realize, were just as obstinate as he was. Maybe it was a human trait overall, to pick a hill and then prepare to die on it. Skrulls tended to be a lot more… flexible when it came to plans.

Maybe it had something to do with humans being monoforms.

Tom doubled back when he saw that Bill and Eli were facing off now, and grabbed their arms. “Come on, geriatrics. Get clear now, argue later.”

“Going that way doesn’t make any sense,” Eli argued. “The car is that way.” He jabbed a finger back the way they’d come, at the back door of the motel and the parking lot on the other side of the motel.

The building erupted in fire.

Dorrek only heard the charge of the energy cannon in retrospect, a whine just below the audible, followed by an explosion that shattered the sound barrier. The blast turned the sky red and orange, flames billowing out and catching everything flammable in their path.

The heat hit him as a shockwave, Dorrek instinctively shoving Bill and Eli behind him and taking the brunt of it himself. His skin sizzled, accompanied by the faint smell of scorched hair and the tingle of his healing as it set about correcting the burn damage before he could feel any pain.

When Dorrek opened his eyes again, and dropped his arm down from his face, the building was consumed in flames. A handful of people were visible at the side door, evacuating as the fire alarm rang.

Tom picked himself and Kate up from where they’d hit the dirt, brushing the grass from his clothes. “So,” he said shakily. “I think Billy won that argument.”

“Shut up,” Eli told him. “And start running.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Green Book was a real series of annual periodicals listing the safe places for Black motorists to stop for supplies or rest breaks. Especially prior to the Civil Rights Act being passed in the 1960s, stopping at the wrong gas station or motel could lead to lynchings, and ‘sundown towns,’ where Black visitors are not welcome after sunset, still exist unofficially in a number of the regions covered. The Green Book was originally based on similar periodicals printed for Jewish road-trippers in the 1930s.
> 
> https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/the-green-book#.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An escape is made, a chase, and then a revelation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I defended my PhD today, and passed. I've got a doctorate now, y'all. It's been one hell of a day. How about we celebrate with a fic update?

They set off at a run, no point in doubling back to try and get to the car. Even if it had survived the blast—which Bill was seriously beginning to doubt—the silhouetted shapes of the alien Kree against the fire absolutely confirmed his fears.

And then the Kree soldiers started moving toward them, crossing the back lawn, and adrenaline pumped hot through his veins. Fire trucks rushed by them, alarms clanging, and they used the distraction to turn the corner and keep heading away from the motel. Bill couldn’t stop himself from looking back over his shoulder every couple of minutes, his chest heaving and lungs tight.

The tree-lined street gave way to a more industrial area a couple of blocks away, quiet suburban housing turning to taller grey stone buildings, traffic lights, and a handful of men laughing raucously outside a bar. Every once in a while he caught a glimpse, a flash of light off something that might be a gun barrel, or a shout when someone else caught sight of their pursuers’ blue skin and otherworldly dress.

And even when he didn’t see anything behind them, Dorrek urged the group to keep running.

Kate had ditched her heels at some point, keeping up with the group in bare feet, her stockings shredded and her bag bouncing against her back.

Another corner, a block and then a third—Bill had to stop, sagging against the wall of the bank building, struggling to catch his breath. Tommy barely seemed winded, but Eli looked in as bad a shape as Bill.

“I think we lost them,” Bill said hopefully, peering into the distance. They were still in the same general neighbourhood, the night sky glowing orange from the fire in the near distance. “Maybe they’ll give up.”

“Maybe,” Dorrek replied with a frown, his eyes trained into the distance. What was he seeing, out there in the dark? Enemies, hunting him down across an alien landscape, or the possibility of safety? What would they do to Dorrek if they caught him? Shoot him? Or clap him in chains, drag him away to an internment camp, subject him to starvation and torture for having had the bad luck to be born the ‘wrong’ kind of person?

Bill’s jaw set. He’d had his doubts at one point or another, but this settled them. Whatever he had to do, he was not going to let _that_ happen. Not now, not ever.

It wouldn’t make up for staying safe in America, not when he could have enlisted, could have flown across the ocean and joined the partisans, or the resistance. Bill already had blood on his hands from inaction. But in bar mitzvah class—more than fifteen years ago now—old Rabbi Ostrovski had harped endlessly about a line from the Talmud. _'Whoever rescues a single life earns as much merit as though he had rescued the entire world._ ’ And that was a mitzvah he _could_ fulfill.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” Kate shook her head. “There!” They rounded the corner at the far end of the street, three-no, still four figures, various shapes and sizes, all blue-skinned, armed and armoured in tech that Bill couldn’t begin to recognize.

Eli hissed between his teeth. “We’re never going to outrun them, not this way. Kate can’t keep up this pace.”

“I can keep up just fine, Mr. Librarian. You worry about yourself.”

Bill should have seen it coming in Tommy’s voice, the way he pushed himself off the wall and stripped off his jacket, but he was still caught off-guard when Tommy shoved his blazer into Bill’s hands and grabbed Kate for a fierce kiss. “I’ll draw them off,” Tommy declared, already moving. “You guys run. Rendezvous at Eli’s motel!”

“Tommy, no!” Bill grabbed for him, but Tommy was already heading out to the street.

“I’ll go, they’ll follow me,” Dorrek insisted, moving faster than Bill could, but that-

“You can’t. The entire point of this is to keep you safe,” Bill argued, torn. He looked back and forth between his brother, the alien hit squad who were going to notice him any moment now, and the prince that he’d just sworn to protect.

“It’s what?” Eli asked, distracted by their interchange.

“Start moving, assholes!” Tommy called back, crouching low behind a parked car and heading for a motorcycle that was parked kitty-corner to the hydrant. So that was the plan.

“Come on,” Bill urged, grabbing Dorrek’s arm and pulling him in the other direction. “He knows what he’s doing.” _I think._

“If you say so,” Dorrek muttered, definitely unconvinced.

Tommy did something down beside the motorcycle, then threw a leg over it and the engine roared to life. One of the aliens shouted something, words Bill didn’t understand, but Dorrek winced.

He pulled his blaster from under the back of his blazer, not bothering to hide it from the others’ eyes, and tapped at a blinking screen on the back. It began to whine almost sub-audibly, a high-pitched electronic shriek that made Bill’s ears ring.

Kate clapped her hands over her ears.

Dorrek threw the blaster. It soared through the air farther and harder than Joe DiMaggio could slam it. One of their pursuers took a shot, swinging a rifle up and firing at the movement.

It exploded in mid-air, an energy shockwave expanding and shattering windows in the buildings along the street, in the cars, the glass of the streetlights showering down into the street.

Tommy revved the motorcycle and sped it off in the opposite direction. “Come on!” Kate urged, already moving, and the others took off running.

They stumbled through alleyways as they headed for the hotel, East 5th Street a million miles away.

Eli led the way, the map memorized, taking them through cramped back alleys and under an overpass where their footfalls echoed like beating hearts.

_Tommy_ , Bill’s heart cried out, and at every intersection he looked back. Surely he’d be there this time, screaming up behind them on the hotwired motorcycle, laughing his stupid laugh, the wind in his pale blond hair.

Electricity hung in the air, a storm on the way.

The world narrowed to one foot in front of the other, the sidewalks and concrete beneath his feet, ears straining for the sounds of a motorcycle, or energy blasts, or that strange, guttural, alien tongue.

The hotel where Eli was staying was set back against the highway, a long three-story block with a broad glass front door. Music blared as the door swung open, partiers stumbling out into the night. Bill caught his breath, the sheer normality of the moment jarring him out of his tunnel-vision.

“Hold up,” Kate grabbed his shoulder, adjusting her shoes. She’d put them back on at some point, when they’d started picking their way through back and side streets rather than bolting at a breakneck pace down more open roads, but the straps were cutting in to the tops of her feet and she grimaced as she loosened the buckles. “Next time we go on the run, I’m wearing combat boots,” she groused, her face tight with worry.

The shoes weren’t the reason she was within a hair’s breadth of snapping. Not from the way she met Bill’s eyes and they both looked back the way they’d come. But if she wasn’t going to say it, neither was he.

“Can we go in there?” The people who’d come out were white, the sign above the door advertising a jazz club, but that didn’t necessarily mean that Bill, Kate and Dorrek would be at all welcome inside.

“It’s fine,” Eli nodded, holding his side like he had a stitch in it. “We go in the bar, look like you’re going to hear the band, then slip out. I’m in room 103. I’ll meet you in the hall.”

“Tommy knows?” Bill asked, and Eli nodded in response.

“He’ll find us.”

“You’ve got a lot of faith in someone you barely know,” Kate replied, a faint smile appearing on her face when Eli met her eyes.

“What can I say?” Eli grumbled, his smile mirroring hers. “He’s growing on me.”

Bill hesitated in the street, watching the corner.

The Kree had followed Tommy, at least for a while, giving Dorrek the chance to get away. But where was he now?

Nothing in science suggested that there was any truth to the folklore about twin bonds. No force in the universe should be able to link two brains along invisible telegraph wires. But science hadn’t prepared him for Dorrek, either.

Bill closed his eyes and reached out into the black.

There was nothing there that he could describe, nothing that could be tested or proved, only a faint sense of movement, of speed.

_Come on, Tommy._

A hand at his elbow made Bill just about jump out of his own skin, his eyes flying open. Kate tugged at his arm, pulling him toward the door. “Inside, Billy. Before someone spots us.”

Nodding, his heart clenching tight with worry, Bill took one last look down the empty road, and followed.

* * *

 

Slipping in through the front room turned out not to be a problem, a mixed crowd gathered to hear the blues band. The smoke-filled room was full of life, glasses clinking, conversation and laughter rising and falling through the music, no worries at all about government agents, homicidal aliens, or missing brothers. Bill was tempted to linger, just long enough for a drink, the utter _normalcy_ of the whole thing so desperately seductive.

But Dorrek had paused in the door to the hall, Tommy was gone, and nothing about Bill’s life was normal anymore.

He paused long enough to buy a gin and tonic at the bar from a distracted bartender who either didn’t notice or didn’t care about Bill’s disheveled clothes, or the smell of fire and sweat that clung to him.

Bill drained half his drink in one long pull on the hushed walk to Eli’s room, the gin burning down his throat and sitting heavy and hot in his empty stomach. Kate snagged the glass from his hand, throwing the rest back. She grimaced—at the taste and then at him—but didn’t say a word.

Eli’s room was small, less than half the size of the double motel room that Bill and Dorrek had been in only an hour before. When Bill’s biggest worry had been how to cope with morning wood with Dorrek sleeping in the next bed.

It was a bad idea to think further back to a week ago, when his only real problems had revolved around grant application deadlines and his total lack of a social life.

Amazing what a little forced perspective could do for a guy.

Eli kept the lights off, the only illumination in the room coming from the yellow-orange glow of the streetlight outside the window. The white-painted wall was cool against Bill’s back as he slid down it, dropping to rest on the hardwood floor next to the tidy single bed. Dragging the chair over to the window, Eli sat down and watched through the gap between the window and the curtain. The only sounds came from the club downstairs, the low thump of the double-bass vibrating up through the floor.

Silence stretched out between the four of them, Bill’s gaze split between the window and the door. A small clock on the bedside table marked off the seconds, the hand moving agonizingly slowly from one notch to the next.

Tick. Tick. Tiiiiiiiiii-

_Is time standing still?_

Ck.

Where was he?

Where were _they_?

Worst case scenario, the Kree soldiers had caught up to Tommy, killed him, and were about to find Bill and the others and do the same thing to them.

Best case scenario—was what? Tommy had blown _them_ up instead and was coming back to proclaim his victory?

Probability of that happening was less than zero. He had no idea who and what he was up against, and that ignorance was Bill’s fault.

If he’d only told Tommy more.

An engine gunned in the distance, a little louder than the regular traffic noise from the highway, and Bill’s breath caught in his throat.

Nothing followed, and he growled his displeasure low in his throat. “We can’t just wait here,” Bill burst out, pushing himself to his feet. Dorrek half-rose with him, Kate interrupting her pacing across the cramped floor.

“What are you going to do?” Dorrek asked, his eyes cutting toward Eli, sitting and scowling by the window. “You can’t go after him, Bill. You have no idea where they are—or the things they can do.”

“And you do.” Eli’s voice was tight, his arms folded firm across his chest. “I think it’s about damn time someone told us what the hell is really going on here.”

Kate wasn’t any help, her jaw just as set as Eli’s when Bill turned to look at her. “What he said, Billy. Aliens, I got that part. But now Tommy’s out there, and we’ve been ignoring most of the weirdness in the faint hopes that you’ll start talking on your own-”

“I wasn’t hoping that.” Eli glared at them both.

“-and now it’s time to spill.”

“It’s not that simple,” Bill started to say. “The reason I didn’t ask you to help when this all started was so that I wouldn’t put you in danger in the first place. But it’s all snowballed out of control.”

“And we’re in danger now anyway,” Kate pointed out, her stance softening a little. Not so much that he actually felt any kind of relief, but enough so that it probably meant she wasn’t about to haul off and smack him. “So fill us in.”

“That’s ‘fill us in or we’ll beat it out of you,’ isn’t it?”

“I wasn’t saying that _specifically_.”

_BANG_

Dorrek dropped to the floor and brought Bill down with him. Eli and Kate hit the dirt a breath later.

The sound came from outside, a mechanical explosion followed by a string of smaller pops and bangs that got louder as they got closer.

Trapped against and half-under Dorrek, Bill’s body decided that the combination of adrenaline rush, gin, and the firm press of hard muscle all along his back and side was the best thing ever. Blood rushed hot to his groin, his lungs tight. He struggled and forced his way out from under Dorrek’s arm, forcibly _willing_ his body to stand down.

The window panes were intact, no shattered glass suggesting the hail of bullets he’d half-expected from the noise.

“That wasn’t gunfire.” Eli pushed himself to his feet and checked the window again. “The hell was it?”

Kate shoved her feet back into her shoes. “I’m not waiting any longer. Billy, you coming?”

“Hell yes.” Billy shook off the hand Dorrek had placed on his arm and headed for the door. He’d barely put his hand on the doorknob when it jiggled.

_They found us!_

The thought only lasted a split-second before his more rational brain caught up with a flood of information—why would Kree soldiers be trying the door when they had bazookas?

Whoever was outside thumped on the door, louder again. “Come on, assholes,” came the muffled voice. Billy flipped the lock and yanked it open, flinging his arms around the butthead on the other side.

“Get off,” Tommy grumbled, pushing through the door as Billy disengaged. Relief flooded through him, along with irritation, exasperation and that same general sense of total loss of control over the situation that had been swamping him since finding Dorrek in the first place.

“What the hell happened to you?” Billy closed the door behind them and finally got a good look at his brother. Tommy was covered in dust, long scrapes on his knees and elbows—his clothes shredded—suggesting a wipeout on the bike somewhere along the way. The bags of takeout in his hands and the smell of greasy fries suggested he wasn’t all that bothered by it. “You are such an asshole,” Bill sighed before Tommy had the chance to answer.

“You say such nice things.” Tommy dropped the bags on the dresser as Kate tackled him. Once he extracted himself he sprawled, loose-limbed and exhausted, into the chair Eli had been sitting in until a moment ago.

“I grabbed that bike and took off on the highway for a while, laid down a bunch of circles. I figured if they were tracking me with something, it’d confuse the hell out of them at least long enough to let you guys get out of range.”

“It worked,” Dorrek agreed grudgingly, like he didn’t want to admit that humans might have a chance without him. (Or maybe not like that, but Bill’s emotions were ricocheting all over the place and ‘general annoyance with everything everyone else was doing’ seemed to be a reasonable place to stay.)

“They popped up behind me every once in a while, but you’ll never guess what happened right at the end there. I was barreling down an exit ramp, and one of those assholes was right in front of me. I dropped the bike and bailed out-” Tommy held up his shredded sleeves—and thankfully not badly shredded arms underneath—in demonstration.

“So the bike goes skidding into his legs. I’m rolling into the ditch,” he elaborated, hands gesturing in the air as his story picked up speed, “and instead of taking him out, that shit just _bounces_ off his legs. Or more like right in front of his legs, like there was something invisible right in front of him. And then—and this is where it gets really weird—”

“Weirder than invisible shields?” Eli asked, shaking his head at the whole thing.

“He had this thing on his wrist, I couldn’t get a good look at it. But he poked it a couple of times, like he was punching a button, and then woosh!” Tommy threw his hands in the air.

“Woosh?” Kate asked, around a mouthful of the burger she’d discovered in the bag.

“He disappeared! Vanished! Woosh! Invisible man.”

It was Kate’s turn to give him a skeptical look. “You hit your head harder than you thought, boyo.”

“He didn’t.”

Dorrek spoke and the room fell silent. Bill wheeled around to see him, standing there with his hands in his trouser pockets, blond hair falling over his brow, looking every inch the human man he was pretending to be. Bill’s heart thudded painfully in his chest.

“What Tom saw was real. That was a Kree transporter he was using, and a personal shield.”

Now he had everyone’s attention, Eli moving from the wall to join the group in the centre of the room, Kate frozen mid-chew.  

“It’s their ship that crashed, isn’t it?” she guessed—so very close to the truth. Tommy was really into it now, leaning forward, his sharp gaze boring into Dorrek and Bill alike. “Are we actually trying to steal a spaceship from guys with laser bazookas? Because that’s a level of recklessness that’s over the top even for the Danger Twins here.”

“Hey!” Bill objected, but Tommy just grinned.

Dorrek shook his head. “It’s not their ship that your army has in custody. It’s mine. And I’m honestly very sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused you.”

He shifted, that familiar fluid rearrangement. His body settled into the bigger, stronger Skrull build, his clothes rearranging to that original alien bodysuit, and his skin flushing into green.

He filled the tiny hotel room, his presence taking up all the space that his body didn’t, his head held high and his bearing so regal that Bill had to fight the urge to drop to one knee and swear fealty right there and then.

“My name is Dorrek the Eighth, son of Anelle, grandson of his Imperial Majesty Dorrek the Seventh, heir to the throne of the Skrull empire. And the Kree are here looking for me.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things start out well, but you knew that wouldn't last. The gang make it to the base, but they're not the only ones going for the spaceship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to be very clear when I note that this chapter was written and posted to a different site _months_ before the Captain Marvel movie came out. _Months._

“Holy shit!” Tommy yelped, backing up over the bed as Dorrek shifted, tripping over his own feet to land on his backside on the far side of the room.

So maybe the reveal had been more dramatic than Dorrek would normally go for, but the moment had seemed to call for something a little more impressive than just explaining. And whatever he did would have to cut through the moments he’d seen in their broadcast programs where the friends spent half the movie or episode trying to convince the hero that the strange occurrences were all in his head.

(It also occurred to Dorrek that he had indeed mentally cast Bill in the ‘hero’ role, but it fit rather nicely.)

Only he had no idea what to do next. If they attacked, he could take them, but he didn’t want to hurt anyone.

“More aliens,” Eli let out a sigh that sounded more resigned than anything else. “And you brought one home. Of course you did.”

“No way,” Kate breathed out, and she didn’t run. Bill didn’t either, though of course Dorrek hadn’t expected him to be surprised. He stood at Dorrek’s side, arms folded across his chest, staring down the other three in the room.

Kate took a step closer and Dorrek relaxed. Not entirely, just enough that he wasn’t bracing for an attack. He offered her a hesitant smile and her eyebrow went up. Then she poked his chin, the ridges there different from humans’ smooth jawlines. “Is that a prosthetic? It’s pretty good.”

“That’s my face.”

“Green? Seriously?” She was still looking at him with a skeptic’s eye, but unless he was entirely mistaken…

“Green’s a good colour,” Dorrek protested, the grin working its way back onto his face. “Better than peachy-whatever-the-heck you’ve got.”

A loud snort came from Eli’s side of the room. “Preach it.”

Tom pushed himself back to his feet and rejoined the circle. Dorrek felt rather than heard the release of air from Bill’s lungs as he relaxed as well. “You’ve been an alien this whole time?” Tom asked, giving Dorrek a full once-over before sharing a look with Bill that Dorrek couldn’t read.

“No, he decided this morning that he was bored with being human. What do _you_ think?” Bill glared at his brother.

“It’s not every day an alien falls out of the sky, I think I’m allowed to be a little bit skeptical!”

Eli smiled—actually smiled—and Dorrek had to blink to make sure he was really seeing it. “It’s better than federal agent, I’ll give him that.”

“Thank you. I think.”

Tom didn’t seem quite as accepting as the others. “You actually trust him _more_ because he’s a monster from outer space?”

“Given the choice between space monsters and the American government? Damn straight.”

“He’s not a monster, you assholes.”

“Shh, Billy. You’re biased. All that muscle mass has you distracted. Not that I blame you.”

“Can we _please_ get back on topic?” Bill flung himself into the nearest chair, his lower lip curling. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, the energy seeming to sag out of him now that the imminent danger was past.

Mostly, anyway. Dorrek cast a worried look at the curtained window and took the moment to shift back to his human disguise. Not that anyone could see him now, but if the wrong person opened the door at the wrong moment, he would have a lot more than a little bit of explaining to do.

Kate made a small sound that he interpreted as disappointment. “So how about a run-down for those of us coming in late?” she asked, with a pointed look at Bill. “I’m all for putting the screws to the military, but I think we deserve to know what we’ve actually signed on for.”

“Should I?” Bill asked, but Dorrek shook his head.

Dorrek sat gingerly on the edge of the bed, the whole moment still so terribly precarious. “It’s easier if I start – maybe not from the beginning, because we’ll be here all night.”

“We will anyway, at this rate.”

“Shut up, Tommy.”

“Bite me, William.”

“So Dorrek is actually your first name,” Kate prompted, settling in the other empty chair and leaving Tom and Eli to stand on their own.

“Right,” Dorrek sighed. “The ‘Teddy’ thing was Bill’s idea. It sounded less… alien.”

“I like it. For what that’s worth,” Kate offered with a grin. “It suits you. The this-you, anyway.”

“Thank you?” Dorrek couldn’t think of another appropriate response to that one, so he mentally shrugged and moved on. “My people are called the Skrulls, and we have an empire that spans most of the Andromeda galaxy.”

“And here’s where we go straight into Flash Gordon land,” Eli commented dryly. “If I hadn’t seen what I’ve already seen tonight-”

“Shush and let the man talk.”

Dorrek gave up trying to keep control of the conversation and waited for his next opening to keep going. “My grandfather and his predecessors had — have — some particular ideas about acquiring territory. By which I mean star systems. And that’s caused problems, especially with a species called the Kree. The Skrulls and the Kree have been at war for millennia, until recently.”

“How recently?” Eli folded his arms, leaning against the wall, but he watched Dorrek with keen interest. “And I’m assuming we’re not talking about the Indian nation here.”

“It’s Kree with a K, not Cree with a C,” Bill replied, then paused to consider. “I guess. I mean, it’s not like they use the English alphabet… but no. Come on—if the Indians had force shield and space ship technology, the whole Columbus-and-smallpox thing would have gone really differently.”

“I’m the equivalent of about twenty-eight of your solar years old, if I’ve done the math properly, so… about twenty-five years?” Dorrek hazarded a guess, the old aches and half-formed guilt simmering low enough to mostly ignore. “My father is a Kree officer, my mother is Skrull royalty… it caused some problems, especially once my grandfather found out, but it also fixed a lot of others. There’s been a peace treaty in place since I was a baby. Except some people aren’t very happy about it.”

“It’s hard to erase thousands of years of hatred with a single piece of paper,” Bill said quietly, and the grief in his voice was so raw and familiar that Dorrek had to stop and catch his own breath.

“There are Skrull pure-blood fanatics who see me as a genetic abomination.” Dorrek continued, proud of the way he was able to say that without his voice catching. “And Kree secessionists who blame me for the Kree surrender. That if I hadn’t been born — or no longer existed — there’d be no reason for the Kree collective to obey any of the treaty terms.”

“Which makes you a target.” Tom rejoined the conversation, his restless pacing a mirror of his brother’s from before. “Got it. And you just _happened_ to be hanging out in our solar system when these guys caught up to you?”

Dorrek almost flushed, catching the reaction before his cheeks could go warm, but he did grin sheepishly. “Essentially? This system is off-limits, and has been especially since you started exploding atoms. You’re not considered advanced or trustworthy enough to engage with interstellar empires yet.”

“Hey!” Tom objected.

Eli huffed a laugh. “They’re not wrong.”

“But?” Kate asked, cocking her head.

“But you also broadcast some really interesting programs,” Dorrek confessed. “I picked up a couple of transmissions a while ago and I’ve come back more than once to catch up. I can intercept some of your broadcasts from just outside the lunar orbit. I particularly like the ones with your ideas about space. They’re excellent comedy.”

There was a pause, a half-beat of silence so profound that for a moment he was worried… then Tom, Kate _and_ Eli collapsed into laughter.

“Oh my God, you two idiots really are a perfect pair,” Kate gasped for air, while Bill just looked more and more disgruntled. “You’ve been orbiting Earth in a _spaceship_ to watch _science fiction_?”

“He likes the space ones!” Eli snickered, wiping his eyes with his knuckle.

“We don’t have a lot of broadcasts like that back home,” Dorrek tried to explain himself, but he had the very strong sensation that nothing would help redeem any kind of authority he might have been able to present. Not at this point. If you can’t beat them… “But yes. I was watching-“ he paused for a second, searching for the word “T.V., and that’s when I got shot down. My ship crashed not far from Bill’s observatory.”

“I was at the telescopes and saw the entry fireball,” Bill jumped in, his eyes meeting Dorrek’s and his expression clearing for the first time since the teasing had really started. “At first I didn’t know what I’d seen, but Dorrek was hurt when I found the crash site and I had to help.”

“Of course you did,” Tom answered, as matter-of-factly as Bill had on that first night. “And that’s when the FBI got involved?”

Bill nodded. “They all showed up the next day, and by the time we got back to the ship, the Army had already carted it off.”

“Which is what brings us to today.” Eli frowned, grabbing the stack of papers they’d been looking over in the car. “And now the mission is to get Dorrek back to his ship—or the ship back to Dorrek—so he can get home.”

Bill looked away, breaking Dorrek’s gaze. “Pretty much. And we have to do it by breaking into a fully operation and staffed military base, all the while avoiding not only our own law enforcement, soldiers and government agents, but a squad of Kree mercenaries armed with weapons that could disintegrate us in a single shot.”

“Sounds like a fun Saturday,” Tom grinned, the predatory expression on his face a little bit inspiring. “What’s the plan, hotshot?” he directed the question to Kate, and Eli huffed loudly.

“Why are you asking her? I’m the one with all the maps and research.”

“Technically, this is Bill’s plan,” Dorrek pointed out, his sense of loyalty and fair play kicking in. Bill gave him a grateful smile.

“Billy in charge? You’ll get us all killed!” Kate shook her head and hooted a laugh, gesturing at Bill and Tom together. “These two are going to say something like ‘go over the fence’ or ‘ding-dong-ditch the front gate,’ and call that a strategy.”

“And what’s wrong with either of those?” Bill argued, straightening up in his chair. Kate’s jab had snapped him the rest of the way out of his sulk, the life coming back into his eyes. “It’s not like we can dig a tunnel under the wall.”

“Unless Prince of Space over there has any cool tunnelling gadgets—like that ray gun thing,” Tom suggested, gesturing at Dorrek with his lifted chin.

“Nothing like that,” Dorrek apologized, hands in his pockets and shrugging. “That was it, really. Everything else I had is on that ship.”

“So we figure this out our way.” Eli spread the map and letters out over the bed, nudging Dorrek until he moved. “One rescue plan, hold the arrests and murders. How hard can it be?”

* * *

 

A sense of loss hit Bill in the gut when Dorrek stood there and told everyone… told them _everything._ He’d known it would come. It had been inevitable since the moment Tommy and Kate had shown up in town. The one claim he had on something special, the one link he could rely on as the only human to know Dorrek’s secret…

But Bill wasn’t special anymore.

He tried to let it go over the next few hours, tried to focus on being proud of how Dorrek navigated his way through the conversations with the others. He’d been a hesitant, stilted mess when Bill had found him in the wreckage, and now- now he looked like he’d been one of the gang for his whole life.

Why couldn’t Bill charm people so easily? He was all knees and elbows and sarcasm, blurting things out and wishing he could take them back nanoseconds later.

It was one of those times where he couldn’t figure out if his disquiet was because he wanted to _have_ Dorrek, or if he wanted to _be_ him.

Or both.

Probably both.

At least the others were taking the whole revelation with a lot better grace than he’d feared. Even if the three of them were going to drive him insane before the night was over.

* * *

 

“What else can you do? Other than the human disguise thing. Which is nifty, don’t get me wrong, but weird if you’re from another galaxy entirely.”

“I can shape-shift in general. It’s a Skrull thing; we can all do it.”

“Does it have to be organic life?”

“No, I-

“Can you do a dog? How about a car?”

“Leave him alone, would you? It’s not a party trick!”

“Don’t look now, but the not-a-party-trick you’re defending just turned into a table.”

* * *

 

“So if you’re the ‘heir’ – that’s heir to what, exactly?”

“… most of what Bill’s star charts called the Andromeda galaxy. Eventually. Honestly, I’m in no rush.”

“A galaxy, hunh? That puts Kate’s trust fund to shame.”

“Try and use his galaxy to pay for cab fare and see how far that’ll get you in New York.”

* * *

 

“To pull this off, we still need a clipboard, a uniform and a Geiger counter.”

“I can provide you with exactly one of those things. … But what is a ‘geig’ and why do we need to count them?”

* * *

 

By the time they rolled up to the front gate of Fort Worth the next morning—Eli at the wheel of the car and Dorrek resplendent next to him as the spitting image of the base commander they’d found a photograph of in the newspaper—Bill was getting into the spirit of things.

“Secretary,” Kate muttered darkly beside him in the back seat, her hair tied up in an elegant updo. “I could have been a WAC. I would have made an excellent WAC.”

“Figure out where to get a women’s army corps uniform and I’d have been all for that,” Eli muttered from the driver’s seat.

“Same,” Tommy murmured from Kate’s other side, low enough that he probably intended for Kate to be the only one to hear it. “When we get back wanna play military police and captured deserter?”

Bill just happened to be unlucky enough to be close enough to get some really unfortunate images popping into his mind. “Please shut up.”

“Shh. The guards are coming.”

Bill braced himself as the uniformed soldier gestured for Eli to roll the window down. Would they pass? He had zero idea how usual it was for a Colonel to show up in a rental car with a bunch of civilians and a new driver, but he had the pretty terrible feeling that, disguise or no disguise, they weren’t going to get away with this one.

“Morning, sir.” The young man’s gaze swept the car, a crease appearing between his brows at the sight of the three of them packed into the back seat.

Dorrek hesitated for half a second before replying. “Good morning-”

“Corporal,” Eli hissed under his breath.

“Corporal,” Dorrek finished brightly.

“Bringing guests onto base, sir?” The soldier,  _Malone_  printed on his name tape, glanced behind himself to the guy in the booth. There’d be a phone in there, as well as the controls to work the gate that was currently blocking the car’s path onto the base itself. Rushing the gate was a bad idea, but if this didn’t go the way it was supposed to…

“Doctor Kaplan from the New Mexico observatory,” Dorrek replied, nodding toward Bill in the back seat. “He and his staff are here to … consult. On the _Roswell project_ ,” he added, all but tapping the side of his nose knowingly.

The plan had been for him to speak as little as possible — God knew what the actual guy’s voice sounded like — but so far the baritone he’d chosen seemed to be working.

“No-one filed any paperwork for that, sir,” Malone straightened up, his chest and the gun on his hip framed in Eli’s window. “I’ll have to double-check.”

“You think anyone’s filing paperwork on anything right now, son?” Eli took over the conversation, shaking his head.

“This is off the record,” Bill interrupted, leaning forward with his identification in his hand. He wasn’t entirely sure if his driver’s license plus his ID badge from the observatory would actually count for anything, but here went nothing. “You can check my credentials, of course, take the time to call in, but we’re here on behalf of-” what had Eli said they were called?

“The Joint Chiefs,” Eli filled in, impatience rattling tight in his voice.

“The Joint Chiefs,” Dorrek echoed, “and they want answers sooner rather than later. So the quicker these people can get to work, the better off we’ll all be, Corporal Malone.”

Malone took Bill’s identification and looked the cards over carefully, front and back. Bill’s heart thudded hard in his chest and bile started to creep its way up his throat. Kate shifted uneasily beside him, hand on her purse. She could probably do more damage with the nail file tucked in there than Bill could do with Malone’s gun, if she had to.

He studied the olive drab of the Corporal’s uniform while the Corporal studied them, tried to count the buttons down the front of his coat.

 _What if they arrest us?_ Four, five, six brass buttons gleaming in the early morning sun. _What if he just shoots us instead?_

Dorrek would survive the first round, but would he survive experimental vivisection, or whatever else the government would do to an extra-terrestrial life form?

A horn honked behind them, another couple of cars pulling in to the long drive that led out to the main road.

“Time’s wasting, Corporal,” Dorrek said firmly, that _tone_ in his voice that he’d used before.

Malone snapped to alert, looking surprised at himself even as he did it, and handed Bill’s identification back through the open window. “Go ahead, sir,” he said, though he looked back at the guy in the booth one last time before stepping away and waving them through. “Your usual parking space is empty.”

Bill let out his breath as the gate rose and they were able to pull through.

“Anyone have any idea where the base commander’s parking spot would be?” Tommy pushed himself forward to rest his arms on the two front seat and watch out the front window.

“We’d better figure it out fast, because they’re watching us go,” Kate reported, twisted to look out the back. “Aaand now they’re on the phone. Drive faster!”

“But not obviously faster,” Bill insisted. “Or they’ll know that we know that they think something’s up.”

“They can’t stop us on foot, we’re in a car.”

“They have guns, dummy, and last I checked, bullets beat cars.”

“And rock beats scissors — just pull in there,” Tommy insisted, pointing at a parking spot close to the front door, and labelled ‘reserved.’

“Come on, come on-” Bill urged, pushing the car door open and all but falling out onto the pavement. They were so close now, only a big metal door, untold miles of hallway and some highly trained security between them and their goal.

Over by the gate, he could make out the silhouette of Corporal Malone leaning in to another car window. He straightened, turned to look back at Bill, his arm raised and pointing.

In that moment, a bright flash of light came from the car. Malone jerked, his head snapping backward, his body arching in the air.

He fell to the ground. The thud of impact was the first sound Bill had heard from the whole exchange.

“Shit —they’re here! Kree!” Bill rushed for the door, grabbing Kate by the arm and dragging her along with him.

“Are you sure?” Tommy asked, stopping for a second to look back the way they’d come.

“Unless you know someone else on the planet with ray guns, move it!”

They burst into the building in a chaotic bundle, an alarm bell on the wall clanging loud enough to send sharp jolts of almost-pain pounding through Bill’s head. Armed and uniformed men barrelled down the grey hallway toward them, the lead soldier skidding to a halt when he saw Dorrek, still in disguise.

Dorrek held up a hand and the shouting stopped, until he only had to raise his voice over the ringing clamour of the bells. “There’s a situation in the parking lot,” he ordered, that regal bearing and aura of command wrapped back around him. “Go to lockdown, no-one gets in here after us. Red alert,” he tacked on to the end, some moment of mischief that got a couple of confused looks from the army men. “I’m going to- erm-”

“Secure the asset, _sir_?” Kate prompted him, her dry delivery not lost on Bill.

“Yes, that.” Dorrek started moving, the soldiers headed the other way, metal doors clanging shut behind them. Down the hall, around a corner where they couldn’t be immediately observed-

“Okay, smart guy, how are _we_ supposed to get out of here now?” Eli demanded, and Dorrek shook his head.

“My ship, hopefully. But locking the Kree out will buy us the time we need to find it.” He looked around, gaze falling on a sign that held only a combination of meaningless letters. “I hope.”

“The hangar has to be on the other end of the base, so we go this way.” Tommy pointed in a direction that looked reasonable, at least as far as Bill could tell. They all looked alike, honestly, the grey concrete hallways and steel railings blending into a featureless maze.

Shouting intensified the way they’d come, and they started to run, bursts of gunfire punctuating the incessant screaming of the alarms and the pounding of their feet on the echoing floors. A junction led to two more of those same identical hallways, and Tommy froze.

“Which way now?” Kate asked, whirling on her heel to look one way and then the next.

Eli started down one of the halls without looking back. “Left, then right.”

“Are you sure?” Kate pressed him and for a moment Bill thought he saw Eli’s bravado waver.

“Yeah, I’m sure. Now move it before the real base commander shows up and they throw us outside to face the Kree on our own!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CHAPTER NOTE: I have completely faked everything to do with the layout of the military base. I spent a few hours trying to find vintage blueprints without getting placed on a bunch of watch lists, and hit the ‘fuck this’ point. If you know anything about the real base, and I actually came close in any way, please know that it was entirely accidental.
> 
> Joe’s Place, the hotel where Eli is staying, however, was definitely real and featured in 1947’s edition of the Green Book.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gang invades (a reasonable approximation of) Fort Worth. Billy and Dorrek go into - and then come out of - the closet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Honestly? This chapter is the entire reason I wrote the rest of this expanded version of the fic. You're welcome.

Human military bases, Dorrek discovered, were not laid out anywhere nearly as intuitively as Skrull ones. Despite Eli’s protestations, by the time they got to the third fork in the hallway, they were no closer to knowing exactly where his ship was being held than they had been upon entering.

“Which way now?”

“Both ways,” Kate declared, pointing down one branch of the hall while she turned the other direction. “If we split up we can check both directions.”

“Oh yeah, splitting up. That always ends well,” Bill groused, the alarm bells still echoing off the concrete walls.

Tom followed Kate, already moving down the right-hand corridor. “We’ll go this way, you take that one. Don’t worry, little brother. I won’t lord it over you too much when we find the spaceship first.”

“I already found it first, so your gloating is invalid.” Shouting rang out from the way they’d come, and the group started to move.

Dorrek instinctively took the opposite branch from the one Kate appeared to have chosen. Bill didn’t hesitate, falling in step with him while Eli started to run to catch up with Tom and Kate. “Rendezvous back here if you don’t find anything!”

“Where do we rendezvous if we do?” Dorrek asked, still in the shape of the base commander. It wouldn’t fool anyone who knew the man, but it could at least give them a moment of hesitation before his own guards opened fire.

“That’s when you fire up the ship’s laser guns and start blasting us a way out,” Bill suggested, pausing to look in the transparent windows of every door they passed along the long hallway.

“I hate to break the news to you this way, but I was in a science vessel. It doesn’t have laser guns.”

Bill sighed, then a glint came into his eye as he shook his head. “What good are you, then?”

“If you have to ask…”

The corridor they were in opened out into another one, this one with a red sign on the wall and yellow stripes along the walls and floor that seemed to be there as a warning. “Restricted area,” Bill read aloud. “That’s got to be a good sign.”

“A good sign and a bad one, considering how much we’re not supposed to be here.”

The alarms from the front gates were muted in this section, the walls changing from grey to a more bleached-out white. The doors set in along the walls no longer had windows. “I’m not even sure where we are anymore,” Bill muttered under his breath.

A door opened in front of them, a pair of uniformed and armed men exiting into the hall. One of them—brown hair, more stripes on the sleeve of his uniform—did a double-take and snapped to attention. “Sir!” His companion, on the other hand, was giving Bill a very careful look.

“Sir, no-one is supposed to be down this way without the appropriate clearances. Your guest isn’t wearing an identification badge.”

Well, crap. Dorrek had no idea how Earth military officials handled this sort of thing, but he did have a general grasp on Skrull chains of command. He drew himself up and resisted the urge to add an extra inch or two of height as he did so. “Clearances are up to me, and I decide where my guests are allowed to go on _my_ base, Corporal.”

“Sergeant,” Bill hissed under his breath, already starting to edge around the guards and away from their weapons.

“Sergeant,” Dorrek corrected. Not so smooth. “Now stand aside and let us pass.”

Instead of obeying his order, the brown-haired guard dropped his hand to the weapon on his belt, his eyes fixed on Dorrek. “I don’t know who you are, but you sure as hell aren’t the Colonel. Stay where you are.”

Bill’s face had drained of colour, his gaze darting to the apparent freedom of the empty hallway beyond the guards. “How can you say that? He’s right in front of you! Don’t you believe your own eyes?”

“Stop moving or I will open fire,” the second guard stated, though he was looking back and forth from Dorrek to his companion with a lot more nervous energy than before. Dorrek could smell the stress coming off him.

No defense like a good offense. He reached back in his memory for something appropriately shocking and awful, and he _shifted_ , right there in front of them. “Blargh!”

Apparently the sudden appearance of a two-meter-tall Uchoran Vampire Cephalopod was as frightening to humans as it had been to a young Dorrek. A pungent odour hit Dorrek right between the tentacles, a dark stain spreading on one of the soldier’s lower uniform. The other turned white and backed up a trembling step before bringing his weapon to bear.

“Go!” Dorrek shouted and Bill ran. Dorrek followed a few steps behind, dropping the terrifying (but much less mobile on land) shape in favour of his own natural form as they skidded down the polished floor and around the corner.

“Stop!” Bullets pinged off the walls, at least one only narrowly missing Dorrek’s arm. The hall in front of them this time was empty, and worse yet, it _ended_. There were a handful of doors set into the walls, some with heavy-duty locks and some without, and there was no way of knowing just by looking what led where. If they led anywhere at all.

Bill spun on his heel, looked around, and grabbed for one of the door handles. He wrenched it open, grabbed Dorrek’s arm and flung them both inside.

Closing the door plunged them into darkness.

The black pressed in around them. Dorrek reached out and his fingertips brushed a wall; behind him, shelves. A blink and his eyes adjusted, revealing the storage closet they’d ducked into. Cleaning supplies, stacks of paper, nothing useful for defense. And in front of him, so close they were almost touching, Bill.

Bill drew in a ragged breath. His pulse was racing loud enough for Dorrek to hear it, and he flattened his hand over Bill’s chest. It was meant to calm him down, show him Dorrek was there, but it only made the thudding beneath his palm race faster.

Bill couldn’t see in the dark. Dorrek made the split-second decision to change back, the blackness filling in his own vision once more. Now he’d feel what Bill felt, be in the moment with him.

That might have been a mistake. Without sight everything else was heightened: the warm huff of Bill’s breath against his throat, the rapid pulse of his blood, the heady scent of _him_.

“We can’t-” Bill started to say, but Dorrek’s hearing caught the approaching footsteps outside. He laid a finger across Bill’s lips.

“Shh. They’re coming.” He whispered it as softly as he could, the footsteps echoing ever closer.

_“They had to have come down this way.”_

_“The hell was that thing?”_

Dorrek couldn’t move, caught in that tiny space, his finger still pressed lightly against Bill’s bottom lip. Soft, soft and warm, and if they were anywhere else, any _one_ else, Dorrek wouldn’t have been able to resist.

Bill’s lips parted, moved under the pressure, his breath hitching and his scent changing again. _Desire, risk, adrenaline, need-_

Warm and wet, the tip of his tongue tasted Dorrek’s finger, and lightning raced down Dorrek’s spine.

He risked moving, taking half a step forward. The guards' voices got louder outside and he froze, his body touching Bill’s along their thighs, hips, chests, with the barest of pressures. A surge of heat raced along his skin, frustration right behind it. If only—if only they were back in the palace on Throneworld, he’d know what to do. He’d seduce Bill properly, lay out the treasures of an entire galaxy before him, spend hours mapping the shapes and textures of his body.

Here, now, trapped in darkness and divided from their enemies by the width of a wall and the latch on a metal door, all he could do was try and resist the ache of desire and the growing fire in his blood.

* * *

 

Bill was in hell. Literal, actual, hell. The Christians were right, it was a thing, and he was in it.

The door had seemed like a great idea at the time, the only possible means of escape. Only now he was stuck in the dark, in something like two cubic feet of space, pressed up against the man who had recently been the main feature of all of Bill’s erotic dreams and very vivid imagination.

The first couple of seconds had been okay, holding his breath in the blackness and listening for the guards. But then he’d become so very aware of Dorrek, the faint not-quite-human-ness of his smell, a whiff of lemon or mint or something not quite either of those in the air. Solid, that’s what he was, solid and strong when Bill was a tangled mess. He wanted to climb him, get his hands all over that wall of muscle, find out if Skrulls (or Kree?) liked the same kinds of things that Bill did.

The finger on his lips had been the final straw, the absolute last possible thing Bill was capable of dealing with. Tasting him had been an impulse, a snap choice made by Bill’s aching cock rather than his brain. But he was _right there,_ skin on skin, and he hadn’t jumped away at the first touch of Bill’s tongue. No, he’d pressed more firmly, stepped right in to tease at the idea of their bodies touching, left his finger there long enough for Bill to suck on the tip—holy _God_ , even his finger was thick.

(Green; was he green right now? Bill couldn’t see in the dark to tell.)

To hell with the guards outside, their voices muffled and (he imagined) growing fainter. There was no hiding now, not from Dorrek. Skrulls might do things differently than humans, but even he had to have finally realized the effect he had on Bill, hear the way his breath rattled.

Bill closed his lips around Dorrek’s finger, curled his tongue around the tip and sucked before letting it go. Dorrek trailed his wet finger down Bill’s chin, then hooked his knuckle underneath, almost like he could see, and nudged Bill’s face upward.

He went with it, and a heartbeat later Dorrek’s mouth covered his. Bill pulled himself tight against Dorrek’s body, the man himself planted and immovable. Was that his so-called super-strength in play? How would it feel to fuck someone like that, or to be fucked _by_ him? All that muscle, all that power, what would it take to make him lose control?

Dorrek’s kiss consumed him, rainfall after a years-long drought. And more than that—he locked his hands behind Bill’s waist and tugged him closer, one of his thighs finding its way between Bill’s. And there, a revelation in the form of a long, hard pressure against Bill’s abdomen, an erection that sent the last of the blood in Bill’s body racing toward his own.

 _He wants me_. There was no doubt in his mind anymore, not with his tongue slipping between Dorrek’s lips, his cock furiously hard against Dorrek’s hip.

He needed to climb Dorrek, to rub against him, to slide his hand down Dorrek’s trousers and feel the silk-heat of his cock. The small shifts they dared to make in the silence and the dark were nothing short of torture, pressure and only the tiniest bit of friction like static shocks across his skin.

Blood beat loud in his ears, his breath shuddering. He whimpered and Dorrek swallowed the sound, covering Bill’s mouth with his own. His hands slid downward, those broad palms and thick fingers splaying out over Bill’s backside.

The strange, stretchy material of Dorrek’s uniform (and he must be back to looking like himself, this was no Colonel’s uniform under Bill’s hands) was smooth under his fingers. Bill got his hands underneath, sliding them up Dorrek’s chest. Hairless, he really was, smooth and taut, his muscles defined enough that Bill could trace the edges of each one—abs, biceps, and then back down.

It was Dorrek’s turn to shudder, his teeth finding Bill’s lower lip and biting, just enough to sting. His hips jerked, cock against Bill’s stomach.

The footsteps receded, back the way they’d come, silence in the hall outside. He took his moment, tugging at Dorrek’s waistband and sliding a hand down inside.

Hot, that was his first thought. His skin was so hot, and he was hairless there as well—nothing but smooth, hot skin and the way he crumpled when Bill wrapped his hand around Dorrek’s thick cock, his mouth on Bill’s throat.

A long stroke up and Dorrek bit him on the shoulder. A second later his hand closed over Bill’s erection, thick and aching. Bill thrust up against him, pleasure flooding his system.

If they were going to die here, at least Bill would die with a smile.

But he wasn’t going to go out without knowing what Dorrek’s cock tasted like, how his face looked when he— _did_ aliens come?

It was vital scientific research.

He felt uncut, sliding easily in Bill’s hand, his breath coming faster as they moved. This was all he wanted, Dorrek’s cock riding hard in his hand, a faint wetness gathering there, Dorrek’s hand working him in return even though it was through the layers of wool and cotton he wore. Bill squeezed tight, felt Dorrek shudder, and lanced his tongue deep into Dorrek’s mouth.

Slick, wet, hot, hard—and dead silent except for the rapid puffs of their breath and a faint whimper down in Dorrek’s throat.

Close, he was coming close, Dorrek’s thigh pressing up against his balls, his big hand fumbling with Bill’s zipper and then finally, oh God, his palm heavy against Bill’s cock, fingers wrapping around him, tight and sweet and _fuck-_

Footsteps ran down the hall outside the door.

Bill and Dorrek froze, hands down each other’s pants and hearts racing.

The doorknob jiggled. Someone outside was trying to get in.

* * *

 

Dorrek untangled himself just enough to grab the interior knob and hold it tight. Staying silent as the knob tried to twist in his hand was the hard part, the rush of panic flooding his already over-sensitized body with adrenaline.

It wasn’t fair! He should have tried to steal more than just this moment, to find some way or time to do more than a hasty fumble in the dark. And now that time was up.

Bill cursed under his breath, frantically shoving his shirt back into his pants, moving with exaggerated care in what to him was still pitch-black.

The knob jiggled again. “I know you’re in there!”

That wasn’t a guard’s voice.

Bill’s face sagged in relief and he felt around for Dorrek’s hand. “It’s Tommy!” he hissed, still in a whisper. Dorrek let go of the doorknob and the door popped open, light flooding the closet and burning Dorrek’s eyes before he could shift them back to normal.

The dark silhouette in the rectangle of bright stumbled back a couple of steps as the resistance suddenly vanished, and Tommy glared at them suspiciously. “Are you two morons making out in there? This is a rescue mission, not seven minutes in heaven.”

“We were hiding from the guards, and shut up,” Bill fired back, pushing past his brother. His cheeks were red, his lower lip bitten-full, and his shirt half-untucked.

Willing away the evidence of his arousal was harder than Dorrek wanted it to be. It had been more than the simple novelty, or the bursting of the mounting frustration of the past few days. He could still taste Bill in his mouth, feel the hot pressure of their bodies locked together, the immediate way the man had responded to Dorrek’s touch, melting and explosive all at once. It took all the force of will he had left not to grab Bill’s arm and drag him back into the closet to finish what they’d started.

“Where are Kate and Eli?” Dorrek asked. Changing the subject was better, give him something else to think about other than the curl of Bill’s fingers and the nimble strength of his hand. Or how terrible it was going to feel to leave him behind.

_Yes. Distraction good._

“They got a hold of a couple of ID cards and a lab coat and they’re talking their way into a lab—we found the ship. Or at least something close to it.” Tommy looked them over and rolled his eyes at what he found. “We do all the work, and you take time for nookie. Seriously.”

“Nookie? Is that a technical term?” That was a word Dorrek hadn’t come across before, though he could figure it out from context. Mostly. Watching Tommy snicker was worth the question.

“Can we not?” Bill snapped at them both, dragging his hand through his dark tumble of hair. It didn’t help. “A couple of guards stopped us, we had to get out of sight. Dorrek freaked them out and we ran into a dead end.”

“If he stays green he’s going to freak out more than just those two.”

A glance down proved that Tommy was right; he’d reverted to his natural form entirely out of instinct, his mind not on the task at hand ( _don’t think about hands_ ). A blink and a breath and he was settled into something different. The base commander was no good anymore, so the human shape he now thought of as “Teddy’s” would have to do. “Better?”

“Not much,” Bill muttered under his breath. He caught Dorrek’s eye and flushed red when he realized he’d been overheard.

“Gorgeous. Now let’s go.” Tommy flung open the door to the hallway and ushered them through it. “Look sharp – security’s running nuts all over this place.”


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's time for all the running and the hitting and the shooting! But who's left standing when the dust settles?

How could he have been so dumb? Blame it on the situation, on the dark closet, on any one of a thousand things, but Bill had been the one to go for it. Now, knowing what he knew, the feel-taste-smell-the _everything of him—_ it was going to be even harder to get Dorrek out of his mind once he was gone.

Assuming they survived the next five minutes. Dying in a shootout in Fort Worth would mean not having to deal with any of the consequences. He probably shouldn’t count on that as a plan B.

Bill, Tommy and Dorrek scrambled around the corner, heading for the junction where they’d split off from Kate and Eli in the first place. Two corridors, three options, one leading back to the front gate. “Which way?” Bill asked between gasps for air. If they got out of this – no, _when_ they got out of this – he was going to have to start jogging. Maybe lifting weights. Karate lessons.

Tommy waved them over to follow him. “Left!”

“Stop right there.”

Billy skidded to a halt. The black-dressed figure approaching them from the opposite side of the junction was familiar. The revolver he was pointing at them wasn’t. The agent looked ragged around the edges, his suit rumpled and tie loosened, his hat off. “Having a rough day, Agent Boyne? I promise you, ours has been worse.”

“Hands where I can see them, Dr. Kaplan. You too, whoever you actually are.” He gestured with the end of his gun, waving Dorrek and Tommy to stand further away from Bill. “I don’t know what they told you, Doctor, or whose side you’re on, but these two aren’t what they appear to be.”

Tommy and Dorrek looked at each other. Despite the seriousness of the situation, his hands in the air and his heart jackhammering in his throat, a gun pointed in his direction by a trigger-happy federal agent, Bill couldn’t stop the laugh. “It’s you who doesn’t understand, Agent Boyne. And Tommy’s my brother. He’s as human as you and me. Most of the time, anyway.”

“Hey!”

“Not the time for jokes, Bill,” Dorrek warned, his voice low.

Bill shook his head but kept his eyes on Boyne. “It’s exactly the time, because he needs to know that I’m not scared. Of him, and especially not of you.” He lowered his hands.

“Aliens, Doctor Kaplan.” Boyne stepped forward into the hall, his gun hand not dropping. “Invaders from another star. And you’re not afraid? That makes you a traitor to the human race.”

“A one-man invasion’s a pretty bad strategy,” Tommy snorted. He glanced at Bill and dropped his arms as well. Only Dorrek stood in the middle, hands in front of him in a pacifying gesture, still in his human shape.

“Please,” he said simply. “Please let us through. I haven’t hurt anyone. All I want is to go home.”

There was agony in that sentence, loneliness and longing woven through each word. Was he using some kind of power of suggestion, like he’d done before, or was that just _him_ , raw and vulnerable?

Bill hurt with him, hurt _for_ him, and for himself.

Boyne’s gun wavered, dropped a few inches, aimed somewhere between Dorrek’s midsection and the floor. “Who _are_ you?” he asked. “ _What_ are you?”

And Dorrek smiled faintly. “I’d like to be a friend.”

The crashing of booted feet echoed through the hallway, a squad of guards in body armour barreling into the hallway from their left. “Halt, intruders!” The lead guard shouted. “Hands in the air, all of you!”

“Wait!” Boyne wheeled around, Dorrek forgotten. “Don’t shoot!”

And from the right, two armed Kree warriors, blue-skinned and with blaster rifles set to bear.

Bill got yanked up, Dorrek’s hand on his collar, and then he was practically airborne. He landed hard on the floor on the other side of the junction, Tommy hitting hard beside him with a crunch and a groan that sounded bad.

The Kree saw the guards and didn’t miss a step, opening fire. Bright bursts of light screamed down the hall, passing right by the hall where Bill and Tommy were sprawled on the tile.

Dorrek dove low through the junction and caught Boyne around the stomach, the pair landing on the floor and skidding. Bill rolled away and to his feet as they slid to a stop, vaulting over Boyne’s legs to get to Tom.

“There’s your bad guy invasion, Boyne,” Tommy snapped. He grabbed Bill’s hand and got hoisted to his feet. “Notice a difference?”

“Run,” Dorrek insisted, his skin stretching and changing until he was himself again, green and tall and blond, fire and determination burning in his eyes. “All of you, get out of here. They’re here for me, and once they have me they’ll leave you alone.”

Holding his forehead, gasping for the wind that had been knocked out of him, Boyne staggered to his feet.

More running feet, more bursts of laser fire in the junction they’d just left behind.

Dorrek handed Boyne his gun. Their gazes locked. Something _shifted_ in the air between them, some new understanding dawning _._

“What are you doing?” Bill yelped in protest. “He was about to shoot us!”

“He’ll need it.” Then to Boyne, “keep them safe.”

And then Boyne shook his head. Slowly, like it might fall off if he made too quick a movement, his grey hair tinged pink on one side with what looked like a smear of blood. “No. You go. Two lefts and a right. That’ll get you to the hangar. I can only buy you a few minutes.”

Dorrek nodded, and Tommy was already running. Bill started after them, pausing only long enough to turn around for an instant. “Thank you.”

“Don’t waste your minutes, Doc.” And Boyne was running again, back to the junction, his gun out.

Gunfire sounded loud behind him, bullets pinging off of something that didn’t sound at all like metal, followed by more lasers. Bill ran, Dorrek and Tommy waiting for him at the first turn.

* * *

 

There wasn’t any time to think, to strategize —not while they careened down one hall and then another, up a flight of stairs that twisted and turned until it spat them out in front of a massive transparent wall.

The room beyond the wall was big for Earth rooms, almost half the size of a hangar on a Skrull attack ship. And down below them, resting on a scaffold and surrounded by small vehicles, cranes and boxes, the wreckage of the small science pod that had started everything. Silver, round-edged where it wasn’t crumpled, and no doubt Earth scientists had been all over it in the past few days, trying to pry open her secrets.

Pressing his fingertips against the wall revealed it to be glass, like the windows of Bill’s apartment, smooth and cool under his skin. A faint thrum of energy vibrated just below the threshold of real sensation, waiting.

Dorrek’s breath caught. An ache began in his chest and spread outward, even his fingers tingling with it. Longing, for home and for everything familiar, at war with the desperate tug, the gravitational force pulling him to stay. A few hours, a few days more-

He had neither.

“That’s it?” Tom’s voice brought him back to the present, the alarms still ringing even though muffled by the concrete walls of this section of the base. “That’s a spaceship? I’m assuming it looked better before it smashed into the planet.”

“You should see the other guy.” Dorrek pulled his hand back, severing the closest contact he’d had since Bill had pulled him from the wreckage. “Does this open? How do we get down there from here?”

“Stairs down—this way.” Bill led the charge and Dorrek followed, all his senses attuned for the sounds of approaching blaster fire.

* * *

 

“There you are!” Kate’s voice, ringing out as Bill pushed open the massive double-door to the hangar, briefly made his heart stop. A half-second later his brain caught up with his ears and he was able to breathe, even as Dorrek bundled along behind and pushed Bill and Tommy into the hangar ahead of him.

The heavy door slammed closed, cutting off the sound of ringing alarms that had been dogging them for what felt like hours now. Bill’s ears felt stuffed with cotton in the sudden quiet. Kate grabbed Tommy by the arm and gave him a squeeze before grabbing Bill around the shoulders for an equally quick hug.

“I like the lab coat,” Bill replied, stumbling as she grabbed his hand and started to drag him toward the wreck of the Skrull spaceship. “It’s a good look for you. You should come be my lab assistant.”

“Come on,” Kate urged, ignoring his lame attempt at teasing. “Tell me one of your guys knows how to get this thing going again.”

Tommy looked around, his forehead creasing with a frown. “Where’s Bradley?”

“Don’t tell me you care,” Bill fired off another smart remark, but once again the joke barely landed.

“He’s trying to get in the ship, but there’s some kind of hardcore lock on it.”

“It’ll only open for authorized personnel,” Dorrek replied apologetically, dodging around a wall of electronic monitors and radiation detectors, paying no attention to the fancy equipment. “I had to swipe a code in order to get into it myself.”

“Wait—you’re the prince, and you can’t just take a ship when you want?” Tommy snorted. “What use are you, then?”

“At least I’m good-looking,” Dorrek fired back, and … no, it shouldn’t have been a surprise at all, but Tommy grinned back at the guy like they were on their way to becoming friends.

It was too bad none of them were going to get any more time to find out.

Bill refused to think about that, keeping his eyes fixed on the glass observation wall on the other side of the hangar. If anyone was following them they’d be coming down that way, same as Dorrek and the twins. Maybe that would give them the chance to see danger before it hit them. Maybe.

Bill tripped over something and caught himself before he fell, a toolbox scattering wrenches and screwdrivers at his feet. He grabbed one, immediately feeling better with the solid weight in his hand. If worse came to worst he’d… do what? Throw a screwdriver at an alien warlord?

Maybe not that, but it was better than being completely empty-handed.

The ship was… it _was_. He hadn’t had a chance to look at it in the dark, in the middle of the night, half-buried in the earth. Now, though, while Dorrek joined Eli at the side, Bill had the chance to stop and take it in.

He stood next to it, was dwarfed by it, and even though half the ship was dented, carbon burns all along the long, smooth curve of the side… she was beautiful. The silver ship had been _in space_. And better than the rockets that Bill had been so excited by, so desperately proud of, she hadn’t only been in orbit, but had travelled from a different galaxy. Was it his hungry imagination, or did stardust glimmer on her hull?

His rational mind told him that anything clinging to the ship would have disintegrated from the heat of atmospheric entry, but even still. He laid his hand flat against the side, not sure what he was hoping to feel.

All he got was a palm full of cold, and then a shock as the ship rumbled and moved under his hand. Bill yelped, jumping back, and saw the panel next to Dorrek and Eli slide partway open, only to get jammed. A grinding sound came from the panel, like motors trying—and failing—to pull the doorway open, but even that stopped after a second.

The doorway opened onto black, but Dorrek beamed. “There’s still some power! That’s a great sign.” He stepped through the hatch.

Without thinking, Bill dove after him. He probably should have been more circumspect, should have cared more about what might be inside, but all that was running through his head in that moment was _spaceship_ and _not without me._

“This hunk of junk’s not going anywhere,” he heard Eli say outside. “Have you seen the dents in the side? It’s got to be broken.”

But inside, oh—it was a revelation. Lights came on as soon as Dorrek stepped into the chamber, glowing faintly yellow. Bill couldn’t see any fixtures, the illumination spreading from everywhere and nowhere all at once.

He turned, slowly, taking everything in. A display tried to ripple into life, and Bill got the vague impression of star charts before it fritzed out into blue garbled static.

The cockpit had been a circle once, but it wasn’t anymore. Banks of monitors and controls surrounded them, about ten feet of space in the middle where the pilot would have been able to move around. Runes all over the controls weren’t in any language Bill recognized. But then they wouldn’t be, would they?

Dorrek was already working, shifting a chair-like thing out of the way and trying to lever open the bottom of one of the metal control banks.

“Can I help?” Bill asked, resting a hand on Dorrek’s upper arm. He resisted the almost overwhelming urge to pet the bulging muscle there, the firm curves and sleek lines of his shoulder and chest.

“I don’t know if there’s much you can-” Dorrek grunted and the panel popped free from the twisted cabinet frame that had been keeping it stuck. The inside was like no electronic device Bill had ever seen, no transistors or coils of wire, but long silver tubes the thickness of his arm, connected with spikes and bars, strange dials and protrusions that he couldn’t begin to parse. Not without days, _months_ to study.

There weren’t any lights on in there, no sense that power was moving through that section of the ship’s inner workings. Dorrek poked at something and scowled at it, popping his head back up to look at the top of the cabinet again.

“You’re going to take a million years doing it that way, and we don’t have that kind of time. Tell me what to do and I’ll be your hands.” Bill prodded him until Dorrek moved aside, then dropped to the floor beside him and scooted underneath so that he was staring up at the confusing mess of metal. “There’s nothing in there that can electrocute me, right?”

“It doesn’t look like there’s any power going into it at all, it should be fine. And even if there was, there are safeguards.” Dorrek crouched beside him. “You’re a scientist, Bill, not a starship mechanic.”

Bill moved to glare up at him, but there was a small, sad and knowing smile on Dorrek’s face. “Scientists down here have to get our hands dirty sometimes,” he replied, and looked away before the wave of _something_ could swell up inside enough to distract him. “Now walk me through fixing this thing so you can blow this popsicle stand.”

* * *

 

It didn’t take Dorrek long to realize that he’d been far too optimistic about their chances. No matter how deft Bill’s hands were or how well he responded to Dorrek’s instruction, the power convertors for the engines were dead. And their group would be just as dead if he didn’t figure out another plan.

What would Kl’rt say?

Did it matter?  Kl’rt wasn’t there. Dorrek was on his own.

“Okay, I’ve attached the whatsis to the thingy. What’s next?” Bill’s voice filtered out from inside the bowels of the ship and Dorrek found himself smiling.

He wasn’t entirely alone.

“Change of plan.” Dorrek grabbed the long chisel-like tool that Bill had brought in with him and started using it to pry open the next panel. “If we can’t get the engines going again, at least we should be able to divert power from the lighting system to the-”

“Bill!”

Kate’s frantic yell interrupted him and he never did finish his sentence. A door slammed open and someone else started shouting—not in English, but in Kree.

Bill scrambled out from under the console. “Shit! They found us!”

“Go! I’ll keep working here!”

Bill didn’t hesitate. He pushed himself to his feet, grabbed Dorrek’s face between his hands, and pressed a fierce, desperate kiss to Dorrek’s mouth. And—probably accidentally—a little bit of his chin.

He ran for the door. Dorrek wanted to follow, _should_ have followed, but there was one last thing he needed to do. If anyone was out there listening, now was the time he needed them most.

* * *

 

There wasn’t a precise moment Bill could pin down when everything had gone wrong, but this was definitely the worst out of a bunch of options. He left Dorrek behind in the relative safety of the flying saucer, skidding out into the middle of a standoff.

Kate, Eli and Tommy stood between him and the huge hangar doors, Tommy all but vibrating with tension. Eli’s fists were clenched, only Kate seemed calm on the surface, but her eyes were fixed on the people who had just entered.

Not people—not humans, anyway. Kree. (He had to stop doing that. Aliens were people too. Did humans count as ‘people’ to the Kree, or was Bill the hostile alien? … And now he was considering the structures of species-level racism while in the middle of a legitimate disaster. Amazing.)

Three of them had entered, one of the big ones with scorch marks up and down his previously shiny metal armour, and a slimmer female bleeding blue-green from a bullet wound on her arm.

“Holy shit,” Eli breathed out, quietly enough that Bill was probably the only one who heard him.

At least _something_ had gotten through those crazy shields of theirs. Weirdly enough, it gave Bill a tiny flare of hope.

The next thing dashed that sliver of positivity to pieces. It was less about the big silver ray guns pointed their way and more about the fourth figure following just behind them.

“Nate? What are you doing here?” Bill couldn’t help the words exploding out of his mouth, even though speaking drew their attention.

The woman barked something to the others in a language Bill couldn’t understand and levelled her blaster at Bill.

Nate giving information to the FBI had been annoying but seeing him in the hands of the Kree drove all that out of Bill’s mind. Dorrek still had his screwdriver, but the bolt cutters sitting on the cart would be even better. Bill grabbed them, the heavy weight feeling good in his hands, and headed for the biggest of the blue guys. “Let him go!”

“I told you they’d be here,” Nate said and Bill stopped in his tracks. He was talking to… the Kree?

He didn’t look like he’d been attacked, his usual button-down shirt and slacks neatly pressed and his expression weirdly cheerful. That expression turned to a fake-looking concern that sent all the hair on the back of Bill’s neck standing on end. “What’s he done to you, Bill? Brainwashed? Hypnotized? It’ll all be okay now,” Nate soothed.

“Enough of this,” the biggest of the Kree growled in accented English. “You promised us the half-breed.” He had a scanner of some kind in his hand and he flashed it at the group, the bright blue light illuminating each of them in turn. “And he isn’t here.”

“This is the guy you work with?” Kate sniffed in Bill’s direction. “Can’t say I think much of his choice of road trip buddies.”

Bill caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. Bill moved closer to Kate. Maybe if he could draw their attention away from that corner of the room- not that he had any idea what Tommy was about to do, but he had to trust.

It would be better than being disintegrated. Probably.

“I haven’t been brainwashed, or hypnotized,” Bill argued. He took a couple of steps closer and found himself eyeball to barrel with the female Kree’s blaster. He raised his hands, bolt cutter still in one, and took a couple of steps back. “You picked the wrong side, Nate. These guys with the blasters are definitely the baddies.”

“You’d think that would be obvious, considering the way they’re not negotiating right now,” Eli’s dry voice came from behind Bill, bolstering his confidence.

“There won’t be any negotiations,” the one who could speak English growled again in reply. “Only your surrender.”

A screech of tortured metal-on-concrete filled the air and the tool cart came hurtling at the Kree.

Tommy let go of the handles at the last second before diving to the side, shouting as he rolled. “Assholes always say that right before they go down!”

Kate fired a half-heartbeat later, an army-issue sidearm raised and aimed at the woman with her blaster to Bill’s head. Eli ran at them, fists raised. Bill swung the bolt cutter as hard as he could, taking aim at the Kree woman’s kneecaps. _Batter’s up!_

He hit something that wasn’t there, the impact vibrations and a fierce electric pulse ripping up his arms and screaming through his shoulders. The bolt cutters fell from his hands, his fingers twitching and nerves seizing. The bullets ricocheted, pinging against the concrete walls of the hangar.

Blaster fire hit the ground next to Bill and Eli dove away, the smell of scorched rubber from the molten heel of his shoe seared Bill’s nostrils. Something hit him hard across the back and he fell to his knees, catching himself on his burning hands before he could plant face-first into the floor.

They were subdued less than five seconds after they’d tried to fight, the English-speaking Kree with one foot on Tommy’s spine and the gun aimed at Eli, Kate with her hands bound behind her with some strange metallic cuff, and Bill on his knees, hands in the air, while Nate stood still in the middle of the chaos, hands shoved into his trouser pockets.

“Little help here, Richards?” Kate snapped at him, and he ignored her.

“Think about what you’re saying,” Nate said to Bill instead, his blue eyes growing dark and more intense as he spoke, his voice dropping closer to a hush. “How can any of us know what really happened out there? This is part of a war humans don’t want to be stuck in. We’ll lose the moment we declare a side. All we have to do to keep this planet out of it is hand over their prisoner, and they’ll go.”

Bill struggled as he was cuffed. The metal was cold against his fingers and buzzing at the same time, some low-level frequency like it was powered, energy pulsing in the cuffs in a rhythm he could only barely feel. The two non-talking Kree circled the room as Nate spoke, the one with the scanner shooting it at what looked like random at various pieces of equipment in the hangar, getting closer and closer to the saucer with every step.

Bill kept half an eye on them, the menace in their movements that of hunters—and Dorrek was their prey. “When did staying out of a war benefit anyone? Not taking sides _is_ taking a side, Nate. It’s handing over the weak to the strong,” he spat out, razors in his soul stripping away the last of the respect that had underlaid their friendship for so long.

“And if you believe for one second that Earth will be left alone after any of this, someone needs to take away your Ph.D. What did they offer you, Nate? Alien bodies for your guy at Yale to experiment on? Did you ask how they got those bodies? What their names were before they were turned into ‘genetic material’?”

“You’re taking this too personally,” Nate replied, glancing nervously back over his shoulder at something in the hallway. Tension threaded through his voice, fear in the glance that flickered back Bill’s way. “Come on, Bill. Stop trying to be a big hero and let’s go home.”

Something was wrong —yeah, yeah. But more wrong than that. Something that Bill didn’t know yet, but that would make all of this actually make sense.

“Nate?” he asked, more quietly now. He moved his fingers inside the restraints but felt nothing but smooth metal. “What have they got on you?”

Nate met his eyes again, and the fathomless look in them made Bill wonder, just for a minute, if he hadn’t been so wrong about the man after all. “I’m sorry, Bill. I really am. I had no choice.”

The fourth Kree stepped into the hangar, a woman struggling against the arm he had to her throat, and a blaster jammed firmly into the small of her back.

“Cassie!” Bill yelped, decidedly unheroically, and her blue eyes widened when she saw him. She started struggling harder, aiming the heel of her shoe at the Kree’s instep, an attack that he avoided without a flinch.

“Enough chatter,” the newcomer ordered. “End this nonsense. You will surrender the half-breed, or this one dies.”

* * *

 

Missing his blaster more than ever, Dorrek took a deep breath. He stepped out of the wreck of the ship.

The last of his disguise faded away as his body reverted to his true form, the black and purple of his uniform stark against the green of his skin.

He took in the scenario instantly—the Kree soldiers holding the humans at weapons-point, the genetic scanner pointed at him that was flashing with a brilliant orange alert, Dr. Richards from the observatory, and the hostage who currently had a disintegrator pointed at her temple. Bill on his knees, his arms encased to the elbows in power-suppressant cuffs. Hardly necessary on humans, but they’d probably been intended for him.

“I surrender,” Dorrek said firmly, his hands open and facing the strike team, as conciliatory as he could make the gesture. “As long as you let the humans go unharmed.” There was always the chance—however slim—that they would be amenable to striking a deal.

It was worth trying, anyway.

“Ted?” Cassie stared at him, her eyes wide and her jaw dropping despite her immediate danger. She struggled again, though half-heartedly, and her captor shoved the barrel of the disintegrator more firmly against her skull.

“Hey,” Dorrek replied, with a sad half-smile and a little wave.

“You guys have so much explaining to do once we get out of this.”

In the light, Dorrek could see the insignia on their uniforms. Not just random mercenaries, then, but a kill squad. The Captain was the one with the translator, his armour dented and scorched from his previous tangles with Tom and with Dorrek’s overloaded blaster.

_Find the one in charge. Get them on-side by any means necessary._

“There will be no ‘getting out of this,’” the Kree Captain dismissed Cassie’s words with a wave of his hand. “There is only one end to this chase, _your Highness_ ,” he sneered, words dripping with disdain. “And it happens now.”

Bill was trying to wriggle away from the centre of the room on his knees, eyes darting between the Kree and Dorrek. Dorrek saw something in that look, something he wanted to interpret as a plea—for help? For him to run away and leave them? They were only in danger because of him. He wasn’t about to leave them to be slaughtered.

“I already told you, I surrender,” Dorrek said again, turning a half-step to keep the lieutenants in his line of sight. “If it’s a ransom you’re after, you should know that my grandfather will take that as a declaration of war. I don’t think the Supreme Intelligence would look very kindly on that.”

“The Supreme Intelligence has been blinded by the false promises of the galaxy’s greatest liars,” the Captain replied, striding forward until he was just out of arm’s reach. Dorrek’s arm’s reach, anyway, though he’d lay any odds that the Kree had a personal shield activated that would block any punch Dorrek tried to throw in whatever shape he tried. He started to pace around Dorrek, looking him over, his steps measured, calm, even. “This is not about ransoms, _highness_ , or about war. It is about blood, and the stain that yours leaves on our entire people.”

Someone hissed, a sharp intake of breath, but Dorrek didn’t dare pull his eyes away from the Captain.

“The Abomination cannot be allowed to continue. Your blood makes you filthy. An infiltrator desiring the ruin of all Kree-kind.”

So that was it. He’d known, deep down, but hearing it said so plainly was a stab to Dorrek’s heart. “My _blood_ is as Kree as yours,” he declared, his head held high. Submission would only prove the Captain’s point. “My father as honourable as yours. More, because he wasn’t a mercenary, selling his civilization out to the highest bidder.”

The faintest of faint beeps sounded from the science ship, one he could only hear because he was listening for it. The longer he kept everyone talking instead of shooting, the better. Or at the very least, shooting at _him_ instead of at Bill or his friends.

“Kree bloodlines are a genetic dead-end anyway. If you don’t embrace the future, accept the need to adapt—to evolve—everything good about the empire will die with the next generation.”

That had been the wrong move. The Captain’s lip curled in a snarl and the look he turned to Dorrek was one of pure loathing. “Better nullification than contamination. Your inferior and repulsive genetic line ends here.”

The faint beep changed pace, the one steady pulse to three rapid beats. Received and answered.

Dorrek smiled, a slow, knowing smile that spread across his face. He saw the uncertainty suddenly flash into the Captain’s eyes in response, a wariness that tensed his body and put him on guard. It wouldn’t be enough.

“You’re going to regret that you ever tried this,” Dorrek informed him. “Tell your masters, if you ever return home, that they haven’t won. The Great Peace _will_ continue.”

The other Kree shifted in their positions, the two in Dorrek’s line of sight trading swift glances. Bill pushed himself to his feet, Eli and Tom ushered over under guard to stand by Kate.

The Kree Captain got over his moment’s hesitation, levelling his disintegrator at Dorrek’s head. “Your arrogance is admirable. One might almost believe you had some Kree substance in you after all. But make your peace with your gods now, your highness. You will not be leaving here alive.”

A shimmer began to take shape in the air around them.

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”

A half a heartbeat, one tenth of a breath, and the transport finished. In less time than it took to recognize the flicker of energy, the hangar bay filled with Skrulls. A full squadron, unless Dorrek’s hasty estimation was wrong, all armed, wings extended, ready for battle.

“No!” The Captain wheeled and fired into the horde, which gave Dorrek the second he needed to make his move.

He dove and hit the floor running on all six legs, shifting back to himself without missing a step once he was within arm’s-reach of Bill. He grabbed for the humans as the transport chill flooded his nerve endings, closing his arms around at least a couple of them before blinking faster than light through the cold vacuum of space.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When everything is chaos, where can a guy and his space alien find a moment of peace?

The concrete-grey of the hangar dissolved, replaced with sterile white and chrome. Dorrek’s momentum kept on carrying them until Bill bashed hard against a wall, the Kree power cuffs that bound his hands taking the brunt of the impact. The wind knocked out of him, he gasped for air, Dorrek’s body hard against his for less than a second.

Then he was gone, calling out orders in a voice that rose above the hubbub, leaving Bill and Eli to sag against the wall. Eli slid down to sit on the floor, dazed enough that Bill could almost see the birds and stars circling his head.

Aliens. More of them. These ones looked like Dorrek, except their ears were pointier, their chins more pronounced. _Mixed blood_ , Bill’s inner voice reminded him. _Part Kree, part these guys, and nowhere where he looks truly at home._ That was an exaggeration. He looked thoroughly at home here, instructing the Skrull at a console in a language that Bill didn’t recognize, all trills and gutterals. The Skrull made a gesture and a golden glow filled the space where Dorrek, Bill and Eli had only just been.

The others materialized—Kate, Tommy, Cassie—and Bill held his breath.

Nate didn’t appear. He shouldn’t have expected any different.

He’d seen it at the last minute, while Dorrek and the Kree were arguing. Nate had moved once the Kree were distracted, sidled over carefully. Bill had been about to yell, to warn Cassie, but he’d held his tongue, braced himself to get shot-

Then the hangar had filled with aliens and Nate had jumped.

The last thing Bill had seen before Dorrek’s shoulder had caught him in the solar plexus was Nate taking a swing at the Kree holding Cassie, and Cassie breaking free.

Now, something grabbed Bill’s still-cuffed hands and he wheeled around, yanking his hands free- free of the cuffs entirely. A Skrull—with a woman’s body shape, but no hair, not even eyebrows—held the cuffs, and a small device that beeped when she clicked a button. She nodded at him once, barely looked him over, then jabbed it into his arm.

“Hey!” Bill yelped, grabbing for her as she pivoted and did the same to Eli, so matter-of-factly that it seemed like she’d done whatever-it-was a lot of times before.

His arm didn’t hurt, and the small red dot vanished before his eyes.

The room glowed again and Nate appeared on the floor, grabbing hard at his arm. He was a mess, shirt scorched and his body stiff like he’d been resisting a beating, but alive.

“You guys okay?” Kate stumbled into Bill and he steadied her, the whole exchange with the Skrull taking less than a second. The cuffs had been taken off Kate’s hands as well and she rubbed at her wrists.

The cuffs that had been on Bill were shoved unceremoniously over Nate’s hands, confining them behind his back.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m fine,” Bill nodded, hesitating as he took stock. Everything felt normal, except-

“Apologies, Highness.” The Skrull at the console was speaking, and now Bill could understand him. “There are no further human life signs within that area of the complex.”

“Are they speaking English?” Eli asked, brushing himself off.

Tom shook his head. “It’s all Greek to me, friend-” and then the Skrull—apparently making the rounds—stuck him in the arm with the same tool. “Yow! Watch what you’re doing with that thing!”

“They’re not speaking English, we’re… speaking Skrull? Except not.”

“Someone really needs to fill me in on what the _hell_ is going on,” Cassie declared firmly, shying away from the Skrull approaching her with the … yeah, that was what it was. With the subdermal translators. “And let me at Nate—I need to kick him somewhere painful for what he put me through.”

“It’s okay, Cass,” Bill nodded. “I think, anyway. All it’s doing is translating. Somehow. I don’t think it’ll make our blood blow up, or anything.”

“Igniting your circulatory systems would be a very inefficient way of execution,” the Skrull approaching Cassie said dryly. “For one thing, the hygiene staff would object most strenuously.”

Cassie frowned at her. “What’s she saying?”

“That they won’t blow us up, because the janitors wouldn’t want to clean up our guts,” Eli answered, rubbing his arm and staring around him at the room. “I’m sure they appreciate the courtesy. Where _are_ we?”

“On a Skrull battle cruiser.” Dorrek approached, looking as sheepish as Bill had ever seen him. “This isn’t the way I would have chosen to introduce you, but I’m afraid it couldn’t be helped.”

“No, no, I’m glad,” Tommy snorted. “Better than being shot by one of those circus clowns down there.”

Eli glared at Dorrek, his forehead creased. “If you could do that all along, why did we spend all that time sneaking around and getting firebombed?”

“I couldn’t, I swear,” Dorrek began, hands up to ward off Eli’s complaints. His gaze turned to Bill and locked there. Bill found himself standing taller under that look, memories of the stolen moment in the closet flooding back over him.

The door slid open _by itself_ , Dorrek turned to greet the newcomer and the moment broke. Bill could only watch as another tall, strapping Skrull —this one slimmer than Dorrek, a body that looked male, and with darker skin—entered the room.

Dorrek headed for him immediately, gripping his forearms and leaning forward, their foreheads touching. They stood like that for a beat, then two, and Bill looked away. There it was. The intimate reunion, the lover from his own species… first among the space harem, maybe? At least the Skrulls were progressive enough not to make it all women.

“Thank you, Xav,” Dorrek said as they parted, and the depths of fondness in his voice were enough to stab straight through Bill’s heart and leave him gasping for breath.

“You’re an idiot,” the other Skrull said, shaking his head. “You knew only trouble would come of your strange obsession with that planet.”

“The planet wouldn’t have been the problem if the Kree hadn’t shown up. I need to send a message to grandfather immediately.”

“My comms are yours-” and then he used a word that didn’t translate at all, coming through as a garbled set of tones in Skrull.

Bill turned away entirely, taking the moment to look around the room. It looked like something that had been set aside for transport, cut off from what Bill assumed was the rest of the ship by a wide double door. Nate threw him a beseeching look as he was bundled off through the door by the female guard, but Bill didn’t exactly feel inclined to jump to help him. Only a couple of Skrulls remained from the group that had been there on Bill’s arrival, one monitoring the console and the other standing guard by the door.

“Let me present you.” Dorrek brought the other Skrull over and Bill had no choice but to look his competition in the eye as Dorrek ran through the introductions. He even remembered Cassie’s last name, which was impressive. “This is my family, Xavin.”

“Family?” Kate frowned, but extended her hand anyway. Xavin looked at it, frowned, looked at Dorrek, then gingerly took her fingers and followed her lead on a handshake.

“The translator’s having a difficult time with that word,” Dorrek seemed to be hiding a grin. “From conversations with Bill I think it translates best to … cousin, in this situation?” Dorrek hedged, glancing at Bill as though for corrections. “My mother and their father were born of the same parents.”

“Cousin,” Bill confirmed, the weight lifting off his chest all at once and leaving him positively giddy. “That’s a cousin.” (It didn’t help any if Skrulls married their cousins, but it meant Xavin wasn’t his husband or concubine right now, which was all Bill really cared about.)

Seemingly adjusted to the circumstances, Eli nodded, looking back and forth between them. In the background, Kate and Tommy quietly filled Cassie in on the events-to-date. “So if you weren’t in contact all along, how did you find us?”

Xavin inclined his head toward Dorrek. “Minutes ago, the Prince activated his ship’s emergency beacon.” He turned to Dorrek, redirecting the bulk of his answer. “We were already looking for you. Lyja noticed you were gone and alerted the fleet. We’ve been sitting at the jump point and scanning the system ever since.”

“The what?” Bill asked, frowning.

“A point at which space and time collapse and make faster than light travel possible,” Dorrek explained. “There’s a transport nexus in your solar system. It’s how I came here in the first place. It’s handy.”

“I’ll bet it is. And what are your guys doing with Nate?”

Dorrek and Xavin exchanged glances, Xavin’s eyebrow arching upward. Dorrek made a quick gesture that Bill could have sworn was a universal sort of ‘later’ before he cleared his throat and faced them.

“They’re taking him to medical to get his arm looked at,” Dorrek replied, which didn’t account for the cuffs. “There are some things I need to take care of,” he said, primarily to Bill, an apology in his eyes and in his voice. “And it’s not safe to send you back down to the planet, not until we’re sure there aren’t any more mercenaries sniffing around. Do you mind? Staying on board for a little while longer, I mean.”

“How long is ‘a little while’? Kate asked, giving him a suspicious look. Tommy and Cassie were already pressing their noses against what Bill had first assumed was glass, looking out at a starscape that had appeared beyond. He could barely make out the curve of what looked like the planet, and his mouth went dry.

“A few hours?” Dorrek didn’t sound all that certain, but it seemed to be good enough.

“If we can get a tour of this place, I’m fine with that,” Cassie breathed out, not turning to look at them. Bill itched to go over, to see what they were seeing—as the shock and surprise was wearing off, he was left with the curiosity, the desperate _need to know_ that had gotten him involved in all this trouble in the first place.

_I’m on a spaceship._

And maybe he’d have a chance to say a proper goodbye to Dorrek afterward. Once his ‘important things’ were dealt with. Bill could still see the outline of the man he’d gotten to know, beneath the confidence that seemed to suffuse Dorrek the moment he’d come on board.

But then, it was only to be expected. He was on his own turf now and _Bill_ was the outsider.

The alien.

“Sure,” Bill said after a beat. “When am I going to get this kind of chance again?”

Dorrek started to say something, his eyes lighting up, then glanced at his cousin, then the other Skrulls in the room, and caught himself before the words came out. “I’ll come find you when I’m done,” he promised instead, catching and holding Bill’s gaze.

Bill nodded, biting back the acerbic responses that wanted to spring to his tongue. “Do that.”

Dorrek hesitated again, then turned and let Xavin draw him out of the room.

“Grandmother’s losing her mind, just so you know.”

Dorrek groaned, one of the last sounds Bill heard before the door closed behind them. “Do I _have_ to go back?”

“Do you want to face R’Kill once she catches up with you if you don’t?”

And then they were alone in the transport room with a guard, and Bill let his shoulders sag. He wanted to run, wanted to yell, wanted to join the others at the window and marvel at everything he’d never seen before, wanted to run and find Nate and escape-

Wanted to stay on the ship and find the library and read everything he could until the universe made sense again.

Was this how Dorrek had felt when he’d wound up in Bill’s car, frantic and afraid and frozen in place? Out of place, unsure and panicking because none of his previous experiences could possibly begin to apply?

“Come along.” The female Skrull was back—or at least Bill thought it was the same one. She rested her hand under his elbow and nodded toward the door. “The Prince has requested that we give you quarters for the duration. You can rest there until he summons you.”

“Get a load of this guy,” Eli glowered at her. “Until he ‘summons us’? We’re not _his_ subjects. Where does he get off telling us what to do?”

“We can always send you back down to wait with the clean-up crew,” she said with as mild a smile and tone as Bill had ever seen, and a diamond-hard glint in her eyes that suggested she really wasn’t kidding.

“It’s fine, we’re fine with that.” Bill spoke for them all, shaking his head at Tommy’s snide objection. “Lead on. And then once the official business is done, we’ll get some answers.”

And in the meantime, Bill was going to have to come to terms with the idea that it was all so close to being over. 

* * *

 

Space. They were _in space_. It took most of the tour and a long while at a window staring at the planet turning slowly below them for Bill to finally, actually, accept the idea. He’d gone along for the ride with Dorrek’s nutty story, the slow reveals of more and more details somehow easier to swallow than their sudden trip through the stratosphere. This was how Dorrek saw the Earth, a small blue and green ball slowly turning in the vast expanse. The clouds—Bill could see the _clouds from above_ , and in a different way entirely than drifting just above the top fluffy layer in an airplane.

The planet was turning away again, the ship drifting to a different angle in its orbit, and Bill moved to the next window to keep the entirely unfamiliar globe in view.

“That’s one hell of a thing,” was all Tommy said as Bill joined him to stare out at the view.

He’d cleaned up okay after the fight, the Skrull medics doing something with a hand-held device that glowed pink to make their scrapes and bruises vanish. They couldn’t do much about his clothes, Tommy’s sleeves still in shreds and his shirt missing a couple of buttons. Bill caught himself making the careful catalogue and forced himself to stop. Tommy was okay, they all were. Even Nate, probably.

Bill was still mad enough not to be all that worried about how _Nate_ was doing.

He tipped sideways instead, leaned his side against Tommy’s, then slid until his head was resting on Tommy’s shoulder. His twin didn’t say anything, just ruffled Bill’s hair.

He did talk, eventually. Neither of them could ever stay quiet for long.

“So?” Tommy asked. _So what are you doing next,_ that meant, and _so how do you really feel about him_ and _so are you going to manage going back to real life after this?_

“I dunno,” Bill confessed, the words settling down around him like rocks on the ankles of a drowning man. “It’s all so…”

_Too much, too weird, too fast. Too much of everything I ever wanted all dangled in front of me just long enough to make me believe that I could have a little taste._

“You’re telling me,” Tommy snorted. “Come back to New York with Kate and me,” he said after Africa started to turn by underneath them. “Or Boston, whatever. You’re wasted in that back-end-of-nowhere town.”

God, it was tempting. Use this whole unreal week as an excuse to run back home, sit at his parents’ table again, see Tommy and Kate on the regular, maybe even find someone of his own- the chances were a lot higher in the bigger cities. But so were the other problems. “And work where? The Ivies all have quotas and they’re getting worse every year. Last I heard Princeton and Dartmouth aren’t even accepting Jewish students anymore, never mind hiring researchers. New Mexico may be far away but at least I’ve got a job.”

Tommy pulled a face, but it wasn’t like he could argue against the truth. “Change your name, then. I don’t mind sharing Shepherd.”

“It worked for you because you did it before law school. My papers and degrees are all under Kaplan, so it’s not like it would actually make a difference. Besides,” Bill said, his jaw setting stubbornly. “I have to hide everything else about myself just to _live_. I don’t care how much everyone else wants me to change. I won’t give up the last piece I have.”

Tommy looped his arm loosely over Bill’s shoulder, and Bill felt him nod. “I get that. You might not believe it, traitor that I am, but I get it.”

“You’re not a traitor, either,” Bill shot upright, wheeling around to glare at his brother, fire in his eyes—until he noticed the smirk tugging at Tom’s lips. “Fucker.”

“That I absolutely am,” Tommy agreed easily.  

They lapsed into silence again, Bill turning his options over in his mind. “There’s a committee buying land for a Jewish college back east, not far from Boston. I got a letter about it earlier in the spring. Einstein’s involved in the campaign—that German physicist who’s been all over the news. I wonder what he’d make of all of this,” Bill gestured at the ship, the view, the planet below with a grim laugh. “Maybe they’ll be looking for an astronomer for their science program if they ever get up and running.”

“It’s worth a shot,” Tommy said firmly. “It’s not like you can go back to the lab now anyway.”

“Not without a lot of new problems,” Bill sighed. “God knows how Cass is going to be able to explain any of this to Dr. Lang.”

“Bring her along. From the sounds of things she and Kate are already plotting world domination.”

“Now there’s an unholy alliance.”

“You’re telling _me_.”

The Sahara, the Mediterranean, Egypt, the horn of Ethiopia—he could see it all beneath them. From where they watched it looked so remote and uncomplicated, so unlike the mess things actually were back on the ground. Would he be a traitor if he begged to stay up here? To have a space where, for a little while, the oddest, most noteworthy thing about him would be that he was simply… human?

* * *

 

What was supposed to be a single call back to Throneworld and observing an interrogation snowballed into a great many more rushed communications, and it was far later than Dorrek had hoped before he was able to slip away. The Terrans, so he was informed, had been given a tour of the non-secure areas of the ship and then sent to quarters in the crew section. No-one stopped him this time as he headed for the softly-lit section, the ship already on night-cycle.

Middle of the night in the capital city, it would be early evening now in Texas. It was startling how quickly he’d adjusted to Earth’s rhythms. Not that it mattered anymore.

At least he had satisfied himself that Dr. Richards hadn’t given much at all away to the Kree. Blinded at first by the possibilities, he’d let down his guard, true. But the rest of it had been motivated by his concern for his fellows and that, Dorrek could hardly fault him for. If Xavin or Bill were in danger, Dorrek would-

Dorrek paused in mid-step. He would apparently consider Bill important enough to be parceled in with Dorrek’s closest living family. That was… unexpected, but not entirely unwelcome. He broke into a jog down the last section of the hall, hurrying his pace to reach Bill’s room faster.

What did matter, more than anything, was finding the way to keep everything he’d gained—while giving up none of all that he’d come so close to losing.

* * *

 

Dorrek wasn’t sure what he’d expected to find when the door slid open, but the sight of Bill perched on the deep sill of the observation port settled the last of Dorrek’s frayed nerves. Bill was scrolling through something on a data pad, confidently maneuvering through the raised projections as though he’d been using similar equipment all his life.

“There are more than a million books on this thing, did you know that?” Bill looked up at the sound of the door closing, stabbing his finger at Dorrek. “A million! I think that’s more than the Library of Congress!”

“It sounds like a pretty dismal library in that case.” Dorrek had shifted into his ‘Ted’ shape as he’d stepped inside, and now he tucked his hands into his trouser pockets as he headed over. This shape was familiar for Bill, the one he’d first met, the one he had to be most comfortable engaging with. Dorrek owed him that courtesy at a bare minimum.

A frown crossed Bill’s features when Dorrek got close, and he set the data pad down on his knee. The projections turned themselves off, vanishing into the matte black surface. “Yeah, well, come back to us when we’ve had eons worth of intelligent civilization. We’re not doing too badly for a species that’s only had cities for the past eight thousand years. Why do you look like that? Are you coming back down to Earth with us?”

The subject change took a beat for Dorrek to parse, but he shook his head. “Not unless it’s needed.” _Not unless you want me to_. “Everything’s gone smoothly. Dr. Richards has made his amends by giving us the information we needed on the Kree, the others have decided on their drop-off points. Cassie and Eli have been trying to broker an information-sharing treaty with the head of astrophysics, but I don’t think they’re biting,” Dorrek added with a grin.

“You’ll send Nate back with us? How can you be sure he won’t put you in danger again?” Bill asked, leaning his head against the transparent port. He glanced to the side, noticed the optical illusion of deep space beyond, and jerked upright.

“He’s promised not to say anything, and I think he’ll keep his word.” Dorrek didn’t mention the nanotech that would be keeping a very close eye on the man for the foreseeable future. Some things Bill didn’t need to hear from him. “Besides, there’s not a lot your planet can do to us. Not until you figure out those rockets. And jump gates.”

“Fair enough.” The conversation trailed off there. The officers’ quarters seemed to echo around them, too big and too empty. Sterile, compared to the warm, home-like feeling of Bill’s apartment. This should be the more familiar space, not that lonely domicile on the mudball below. What it came down to, what it had been about this entire time-

And it was more than just the moment in the storage closet, as exhilarating (and frustrating) as that series of revelations had been.

The stars beyond reflected in the brown depths of Bill’s eyes, turned them to galaxies. Beauty he’d been born with, not deliberately shaped to fit Dorrek’s desires. Their gravity drew him under.

Dorrek’s breath caught. The sheer _wanting_ welled up inside again, along with the sense-memory of the taste of Bill’s lips, the panicked beating of his heart, the skin-on-skin giving Dorrek the briefest suggestion of what intimacy with him could be like.

“We left some things unfinished-”

“So is this it?” Bill said at the same time as Dorrek spoke, their words tangling in each other.

“Please no,” Dorrek answered Bill’s question, his voice soft. “Not it, not yet.”

Dorrek held out his hand, beckoned with his fingertips for Bill to take it.

He did.

Dorrek tugged Bill to his feet, the datapad clattering to the floor and immediately forgotten. “If I remember correctly,” he murmured, keeping his hand firmly around Bill’s and stepping in close. That pheromone rush of Bill’s desire flooded over him, over them both, a heady affirmation that this was mutual. “We were right about here.”

“No, we were not.”

Bill’s voice cut through the moment. Dorrek’s heart clenched painfully tight before he caught the gleam in Bill’s dark eyes. “I dunno, my memory for this one was pretty good,” he ventured the joke. What was Bill getting at?

“So is mine, I promise,” Bill breathed out. “It might have been too damned dark in there, but you were definitely you-shaped. Not this.” And he gestured up and down Dorrek’s body, fingertips brushing his thigh before Bill snatched his hand away.

Dorrek frowned. “But this is me. It’s the shape you liked.”

“If we’re about to do this,” Bill began, his cheeks flushing red, “then I want to see _you_. Not the human costume, or something you think I want. The real you. No masks.”

Non-Skrulls couldn’t possibly know how intimate that request was, but Dorrek did what he asked anyway. He’d done it before in front of Bill—in his apartment, during the raid on the base—but this was different. This was vulnerable, and almost _rude_ not to give Bill all his fantasies-made-flesh. To be perfect for him.

Unless the imperfections were what he wanted.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * This was Brandeis University, officially opened in 1948 as a means of educating Jewish students. Both official and unofficial quota systems restricted Jewish enrollment in Protestant universities across the United States from the 19-teens. Official quota systems have mostly been lifted, or redirected to reduce Asian or Black enrollments as well, but unofficial quota systems—such as legacy enrollments, intended to maintain a high proportion of students from the old Protestant families—still exist in many American post-secondary schools. 
> 
>  --
> 
> As a side note, the oldest discovered site that seems to fit the criteria of what we’d call a city is actually Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, which dates back to c. 7500 BCE. It wasn’t excavated until 1958, however, so Bill doesn’t know about it yet.
> 
> \--
> 
> The astute will notice this is now listed as having 16 chapters. Cris prompted me to do an epilogue, currently in progress. So thank / blame Cris for that. >.>


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The end... ?

Bill watched Dorrek shift, his skin rippling and changing, his shoulders spreading, face sharpening into something close to but not human.

_This is insane._

Making out with aliens never ended well, at least not in science-fiction. Someone inevitably turned into a praying mantis or a carnivorous slug-creature. How did Skrulls fuck, anyway? He had the right parts, but what about the rest of it?

The science side of Bill’s brain might have been spinning up into high gear, but Dorrek’s shift settled down and the rest of Bill completely derailed.

It would have been bad enough if he’d gone back to the purple bodysuit, the way it highlighted every sweep and swell of his incredible musculature. The little shorts he ended up in, though, with nothing else on to cover the acres of green skin, the ones that looked suspiciously like the posing briefs on bodybuilders-

“Like this?” Dorrek asked innocently, but there was nothing innocent about the way Bill’s adrenaline spiked, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth for one blessed moment. “I found some periodicals in your bathroom that were very educational.”

The weirdness of the situation was gone, just like that- … maybe not all of it. He was still big and green and Bill had been single for a long damned time. But enough that Bill could wrap his head around the situation.

In the seconds when he wasn’t being distracted by a bare stomach and hairless chest, anyway. Or the V-cut of muscles heading down to Dorrek’s groin, the tiny shorts covering a bulge that Bill knew wasn’t exaggerated. Or his mouth, his full lower lip just beginning to curl out in the tiniest hint of a pout.

“Cheater,” Bill pointed out, his pulse racing. His mouth had gone dry and he licked his lips to moisten them, Dorrek’s eyes dropping to follow the movement. “I didn’t even get to undress you.”

“Is that part of the ritual?” Dorrek stepped in closer, his voice softening and his eyes still fixed on Bill’s mouth. “How many layers are suitable?” He teased.

He was so close that Bill could lean forward and just… _bite_ him, right on the spot where his neck met that ridiculous shoulder, get right up against his body and _feel_ all that strength, the heat that radiated off of Dorrek’s naked skin – so _much_ naked skin.

Bill went for it, wrapping his hand around the back of Dorrek’s neck, other hand splaying open on that fucking magnificent bicep-

Only Dorrek shifted again before Bill made contact, Bill’s hands landing on wool instead. He was back in the suit and tie, and a button-up shirt beneath it, and what looked like an undershirt under _that._ “Like this?” Dorrek offered, and laughed at the growl of frustration that ripped out of Bill’s throat.

“That’s just not _fair._ ” Bill complained hotly, shaking his head. He followed through anyway, tangling his fingers in Dorrek’s still-golden hair and hauling him down for a kiss. Their lips met, as hungry as before—more so, since he knew what he’d almost had. They wouldn’t be interrupted this time.

“If you can’t have a sense of fun about these things,” Dorrek replied archly, “someone is doing _something_ wrong.”

He was hard before he even tasted Dorrek again, body throbbing in time to his heartbeat. The ache burned through him when Dorrek returned the kiss, grabbed him around the waist, lifted him effortlessly. One more shift and he was in something different, something Bill couldn’t identify by feel. He was too distracted to care, wrapping his legs around Dorrek’s waist, arms around his neck.

Bill’s back hit the wall before he clocked that they were really moving, the cool support against his shoulders a contrast to the tight grip of Dorrek’s hands on his ass and thighs. Nothing mattered except the way Dorrek’s mouth locked to his, the first probing sweeps of his tongue, the groan that pulled from him when Bill rocked his hips up against his stomach.

Breathless, Bill broke the kiss and opened his eyes. Dorrek was flushed, his skin a darker green shading across his cheeks and down his chest, the simple, silky shirt he was wearing now hanging open. Bill grabbed the loosely-draped lapels and stole the opportunity to stroke his thumbs down the sides of Dorrek’s jaw, saw the bob in his throat as he swallowed.

This time he did bite, grazing his teeth along the dark green ridge of Dorrek’s collarbone. His sweat tasted different, bright and clean, like a memory of mint or pine. Dorrek groaned and his hands flexed against Bill’s ass, an impulsive flutter of movement that sparked an equal flutter of satisfaction deep inside Bill. _We’re not wired so differently after all_.

It was easier to let go after that revelation, yanking at the shirt until he got it down over Dorrek’s shoulders. It fluttered to the ground and didn’t turn into… what, he wasn’t sure. An extra body part? Something. The half-formed memory of Dorrek’s explanation of unstable molecules sped out of his mind entirely at the feel of Dorrek’s cock, hard and huge, pressed up against him through their remaining clothes.

Dorrek nipped at the rim of his ear, suckled Bill’s earlobe between his lips. There was apparently some kind of connection between that and Bill’s cock, a static bolt shooting straight through his nerve endings and landing hot and heavy between his legs. His back snapped into a tight arch and he gasped, nails digging in to Dorrek’s shoulders. “What do you need?” Dorrek murmured, breath hot against Bill’s cheek.

“More of that,” Bill replied immediately, his laugh choking off when Dorrek bit down and he saw stars. Only maybe he shouldn’t have been so literal. “Everywhere,” he added hopefully. “Not just the ears. I, uh- yeah, no, that’s really good. Oh, yeah, you’ve got the hang of that. Here-“ he fumbled with his shirt buttons, only getting everything open and off with Dorrek’s eager help and the wall’s support.

“And here?” Dorrek slipped his hand between their bodies and curled his fingers around Bill’s cock. “Your television broadcasts don’t show any of this part of your mating rituals.” There was laughter and desire mixed thick in his voice, gone all husky and low. He teased his fingertips up and down along the length of Bill’s hard-on, the touch muted by the layers of cotton and wool in between, the rough press of his zipper.

“Heat,” Bill managed to find the words, rolling his hips up into Dorrek’s hand, bracing on his shoulders for balance. “Pressure. Friction.” Holy hell, just this alone felt so good he could swear he would die of pleasure before they got to anything on his list. “Wet. Lubrication’s important-”

Dorrek’s shoulders were shaking a little and Bill stopped talking to give him a deeply suspicious look. “What.”

“You,” Dorrek laced the fingers of one hand through Bill’s and pressed his hand up against the wall over their heads. His other hand back under Bill’s thigh again, he leaned in and kissed Bill on the mouth. He stroked in with his tongue, slick and hot. “Ever the scientist,” he murmured when he pulled away, his words and his expression full of such fondness and admiration that Bill felt small and huge at the same time.

“It’s hard to think clearly when I have no blood left in my brain,” Bill felt the need to point out, reaching down to feel Dorrek for himself. He hadn’t had his hands on him like this since the closet and he hadn’t been able to see Dorrek’s face then, just hear him gasp and feel the way he’d responded, thrust against him so needy and desperate.

Dorrek’s face was worth watching, his lips parting when Bill took hold of his cock. Both palms hit the wall flat on either side of Bill’s head when he slid his hand down inside the waistband of the light trousers that Dorrek was wearing now, curled his wrist and wrapped his hand around Dorrek’s cock. He was as huge as Bill remembered, thick enough around that Bill’s fingers barely met, his skin hot and silk-smooth.

Bill’s memory had been pretty specific about what Dorrek had looked like naked and his memories hadn’t lied. He had what felt like a foreskin, cockhead already slick across the top when Bill skidded his thumb across it. Dorrek groaned, his arms trembling where Bill laid kisses down and traced the curves of those biceps with his tongue. Control. He was holding on to control, all that strength tightly contained—if he lost it, Bill was fragile enough that Dorrek could snap him in half.

The thought should have scared him but it only made him hotter, more determined to learn exactly what it would need to take this man apart.

And as much as he loved strong, _craved_ it deep in his core, Bill had never been what one would call ‘submissive.’

He stroked Dorrek again from between the shelters of his arms, tucked his other hand between Dorrek’s thighs on his own little voyage of discovery. Dorrek shuddered and jerked into Bill’s hand, his groan muffled against Bill’s shoulder.

“Your mouth,” he decided aloud, lust and the circumstances making him bold. “You asked what I need,” he clarified when Dorrek looked at him with a question in his eyes. “Your mouth on my cock. Unless that’s a major taboo for you guys, or something,” he added hastily.

“Not a taboo at all,” Dorrek promised, and he dropped to his knees so easily and so quickly that Bill lost any worries he’d briefly entertained. Dorrek had figured out how to work buttons and zippers by now and Bill stepped out of the last of his clothes. He barely had a second to worry again—he’d never been ashamed of what he had to work with, but it sure as hell was nothing like the sheer size of Skrull dicks, apparently-

But only a second, because Dorrek’s eyes lit up and he traced his fingers down Bill’s chest and stomach, with their covering of dark hair. He seemed equally delighted by Bill’s erection, standing tall from a thatch of curls and flushed dark with blood.

“You’re _furry_ ,” he exclaimed, with such obvious pleasure that Bill couldn’t imagine being embarrassed. “Mammals are wild,” Dorrek declared happily, and took Bill’s cock into his mouth.

Yeah. He’d done that before. Bill’s head thudded back against the wall and his knees would have buckled under him, if not for one of Dorrek’s hands curling around his upper thigh. Sensation flooded him, heat and slick friction, Dorrek’s tongue and lips playing over every sweet spot he had.

Bill didn’t dare open his eyes, though he desperately wanted to—to see this, to sear it into his long-term memory, bank every second of it for the lonely nights that would mark the rest of his life once Dorrek left.

But if he did, it would be game over. Everything felt so good, too good, that adding visuals would tip him over the edge much too soon.

He trembled with the urge to thrust, to plunge in and _take_ , only to feel Dorrek’s other hand splaying flat against his right hip. “Go,” Dorrek urged, letting Bill’s cock fall from his lips for a moment. “You can’t hurt me. I promise.” His hand wrapped around Bill’s erection, hot where the air had been cold a moment before-

Hang on. Hand on thigh.

Hand on hip.

Hand on- cock?

Bill opened his eyes.

He had had some incredibly detailed fantasies about Dorrek, yes, but it turned out he’d been thinking small. He had four arms now, two where they usually were and another one on each side below that, the fourth hand lazily stroking his own hard-on. He didn’t seem to have noticed Bill’s moment of shock, or he did and didn’t care, holding Bill’s gaze with his own as he leaned in and ran his tongue along Bill’s cock from root to tip.

“Holy _fuck_ ,” Bill said reverently. Nothing in his life could ever have prepared him for how utterly debauched Dorrek looked in that moment, dragging his swollen lower lip up along the underside of Bill’s cock, catching gently on the ridge of his cockhead, his eyes locked on Bill’s as he drew the tip into his mouth again.

Bill pushed against Dorrek’s hand, the one on his hip, couldn’t help himself. He thrust hard over Dorrek’s lip and into his mouth, felt like it went halfway down his throat.

Dorrek groaned and his hand moved faster on his own cock, jerking himself hard as Bill fucked in.

The hand that Dorrek had wrapped around Bill’s cock before—now he tucked it between Bill’s trembling thighs, cupped and stroked his balls. His mouth slowed, he drew off, slowly and desperately gently. “How do you feel about penetration?” he asked, tracing tiny circles further and further back.

“Big fan, in concept.” Bill swallowed hard against his dry mouth and the lump in his throat, trying to gather up the bits and pieces of his rational mind that had scattered to the winds. “But I haven’t-”

 _Haven’t had the chance, or the nerve, or the partner._ And starting with _that_ would be like trying to deep-throat a pumpkin. “You have _no_ idea how much I want to try that-“ he couldn’t take his eyes off Dorrek’s cock, tried to imagine how it would feel to break apart on it, split in two trying to take him all in. “But I don’t know if I can take it. Not without working up to it.”

Dorrek didn’t judge, just pressed his lips tenderly against the hollow of Bill’s hip. “I don’t mind that. I want to be in you,” he sighed against Bill’s skin. “And you in me. I want to learn everything about how you fuck.”

“Oh my _God_ , you can’t say things like that. You’ll kill me.” Bill laughed and groaned at the same time, Dorrek’s hands and mouth on him again. He kept his eyes open this time, fixed on Dorrek, on the sight of his own cock sliding between Dorrek’s wet lips.

He was making promises as though this wouldn’t be the only time. Bill’s heart squeezed painfully tight and he lost his breath, struggling to catch it again before he really did buckle.

Still on his knees, Dorrek held Bill’s gaze, his hands (four? Five, now? Bill had lost count) keeping Bill steady, roaming over his body, teasing, stroking, pinching. Between Bill’s legs, Dorrek traced the rim of Bill’s ass in tiny circles, growing tighter.

Slick; they were already slick and he didn’t care how. He was empty and yearning, his body on fire with it, and Dorrek was offering him everything.

Bill sank his fingers into Dorrek’s hair and hung on tight, his body screaming with sensation. He thrust in deep, then back onto Dorrek’s hand. His body opened and Dorrek’s finger slid in, slim, small ( _he changed for me_ ), barely any pain, just a strangeness and a fullness that promised so much more.

“More,” Bill ordered-begged-died in Dorrek’s hands, fucking in, fucking _on_ , a second finger –larger now—stretching him, filling him, Dorrek’s greedy mouth working his cock. “More _please,_ I need it, need _you_ -”

Pressure and an intensity bordering on pain inside, lightning screaming along his skin, no place on his body that wasn’t a hundred-percent alive and on fire-

A riot of intensity overloaded his synapses. Bill came, the tsunami rolling over him from the inside-out, starting from the coal burning where Dorrek’s fingers played.

Head thudding back against the wall, Bill couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t actually blacked out for a second.

When the world resolved itself again and his vision un-greyed, Dorrek was sitting on his heels, both Bill’s come and an intently smug look all over his face.

“You weren’t worried about acid burns or interspecies allergic reactions?” Joking was so much easier than acknowledging the muddle of everything vulnerable reverberating through him. Bill swiped his thumb across Dorrek’s cheek and enjoyed the whimper Dorrek made when Bill licked his own come off his thumb.

“Call it hands-on xenobiology research,” Dorrek replied with a supernova-smile, one of his extra hands grabbing his discarded shirt and swiping his face clean.

“For science?” Bill waited a beat while his heart slowed down and Dorrek stood, all his extra arms vanishing back into his sides. Bill’s head was full of static, a bone-deep bliss-exhaustion starting to set in, but Dorrek was still hard, still flushed.

“Is that what we’re doing?” Dorrek faltered for a beat, then lit up when Bill grabbed his hand and dragged him toward the still-pristine bed in the centre of the room.

Bill pushed him by the shoulders, not expecting for an instant that he had the strength to force Dorrek into anything. Dorrek went anyway, bouncing once on what promised to be a soft mattress. Steadier now, Bill took him in as he sprawled across the pale sheets—the physique, the perfection of his cock, the devastating blue of his eyes, the vulnerability and hesitation in his smile. The trust.

Everything they’d lived over the past few days had been building up to this.

“Good science demands repeatable results,” Bill replied, joining Dorrek on the bed. His lips tasted like Bill, his body slick with a similar sheen of sweat, his skin so warm everywhere Bill’s hands wandered. “Rigorous testing. A long-term study.”

Dorrek laughed, a relieved sort of sound, and rose up to meet him. “How very dedicated of you.”

The tension in Dorrek’s body bled away under Bill’s hands and mouth. He hummed a faint affirmative that turned to a gasp when Bill made his way down Dorrek’s body. He had to stretch to get everything in, Dorrek’s cock heavy on his tongue and Bill’s jaw starting to ache quicker than he wanted to admit. But the noises Dorrek made in response, the trembling and gasping—Bill would do this every day just for that. Forever, if he had the chance.

Only Dorrek was still holding back, tremors rippling through him and his hips only barely tipping up as Bill teased and stroked.

He’d have to figure out restraints, maybe the cuffs the Kree had used on him; something Dorrek could work against rather than dig his fingers into the bed. Bill might be a fragile human but Dorrek shouldn’t have to worry about controlling himself, not when all Bill wanted to do was make him let go.

“Come here,” Dorrek urged, catching Bill’s hand and drawing him up to lie face to face again. His kisses grew increasingly deep and desperate, his hand intertwining with Bill’s around his own cock, thick and hard between them. Tongues sliding against one another, their panting breath mingled in puffs of hot air.

_If this is where a proboscis uncoils and stabs me through the brain, at least I’ll die happy._

Slick and sweaty, Dorrek thrust hard into the tight circle of their hands, his cockhead pushing thick through Bill’s fingers. His teeth grazed Bill’s lower lip, body coiled and tense.

Bill closed his hand, tight, tight- pulled at him hard and fast, his foreskin riding smooth as silk.

Dorrek convulsed, crying out. He came, hot and thick over Bill’s hand, over his own, over their stomachs and the sheets. He caught Bill in his arms and kissed him deep, thrusting rough against Bill’s hip until the tremors settled and he collapsed.

On his back in a bed on an alien spaceship, a blond head nestled on his chest and solid green arms wrapped snugly around his sweat-and-semen covered body, Bill had a moment to stare at the silvered ceiling and reflect. No post-coital decapitation was a plus. Though honestly, if that had been the price for an experience like the one he’d just had, he’d have paid it. Everything still tingled, still flushed, his cock half-hard and so sensitive that even the edge of Dorrek’s slowing breaths made him ache.

Bill’s body was satisfied to a degree he’d never imagined possible, not in all his wilder fantasies. And where he expected to feel a hollow in his heart from uncertainty, there was only the faintest echo of doubt. He’d come this far. Gotten Dorrek to safety, slayed the dragon, finished the quest. Earned his reward. Even joked about the next time. It was probably the exhaustion—or the endorphins—but he was starting to imagine that maybe, just maybe, they had a chance.

* * *

 

They took more time on the second round, a hands-on demonstration of xenobiology and erogenous zone mapping that left Dorrek as titillated as he was exhausted. He hadn’t been sure at all about human recovery times, but Bill’s enthusiasm and inventiveness left him thoroughly impressed.

A third time around seemed possible at first, but Dorrek’s healing factor was no help when it came to stamina. Considering the events of the last day or two, he figured he had a decent excuse for being well and truly worn out.

The simpler pleasures that followed satisfied him more than any more orgasms would, at least for the moment. Showing Bill the bathing chamber, for instance, and taking care to slowly wash away the traces of their couplings. (Anyone who could detect pheromones would still pick up Dorrek’s scent traces on Bill, however, and vice versa. That thought filled him with such obvious pleasure that Bill started teasing him about being ‘smug’—though the reasons he assumed weren’t the entire truth.) Finding him sleepwear, ordering food, taking him back to the bed and making sure he was comfortable—all the little gestures that went to show how thankful he was for Bill’s company, his touch.

“You’re _nesting_.” Bill interrupted him with a delighted laugh. He put his hand over Dorrek’s to stop him from adjusting the pillows for the third time. “I’m fine, I’m not going anywhere, get your green butt back into bed already.”

“I’m not,” Dorrek objected, but he obeyed anyway, curling around Bill and settling his arm beneath Bill’s head. It felt right, lying here together in the dimmed light, the wide viewport showing them Bill’s planet turning lazily below.

Bill draped his arm over Dorrek’s hip and Dorrek felt him smiling against his shoulder. “Is this a Skrull thing, or a you thing?”

“What thing?” Dorrek frowned, though Bill couldn’t see it.

“The broody hen routine.”

He couldn’t even begin to figure out what that meant, and the translator wasn’t helping. The context was enough that he took a stab at answering anyway. “It’s only polite to make sure you’re satisfied,” Dorrek objected mildly. “It wouldn’t be right to just _leave_. Not after all that.”

“So you’re only hanging around because of etiquette.”

“What? No!” Dorrek pulled away and snapped his head down to look at Bill, only to sag with relief at the sight of his grin and the light of mischief in his eyes. “Please,” Dorrek snorted, relaxing again. “If I didn’t want to be here, there are a lot of other ways I could be spending my time.”

He earned a kiss for that, a tender brush of their lips that said more than their most passionate lip-locks from hours before.

“So now what?” Bill asked after a few minutes of silence, tracing his fingertips along the folds of Dorrek’s sleeve, then down across his bare forearm. “I go home, you go back to Throneworld? We promise to write?”

Dorrek propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at Bill, sprawled lazily beneath him. He had been beautiful before but now he was beyond words, all the nervous energy drained away, his lean body loose and relaxed. Dark hair tumbled down over his eyes and Dorrek brushed it away, Bill’s head turning to follow the caress. Give this up, when they’d only just found it? Dorrek’s entire being rebelled at the thought.

“Only if that’s what you want.”

Bill frowned. “What are the other options?” he asked, cautious curiosity in his expressive face.

“How do you feel about getting some hands-on experience with exoplanets?” Dorrek asked, a grin he couldn’t be bothered to try hiding playing over his lips. _Please. Say yes._ “You’ve been studying space all your life. Come see it up close instead of through those old telescopes.”

A dozen different reactions seemed to be playing out on Bill’s face, and Dorrek held his breath until it settled on a careful smile. “As what? Attached to a science ship?”

“I was hoping… with me. There are schools and observatories on Throneworld as well, and researchers working with stellar data. But if you want to be on a ship instead, I can make that happen.”

To free Bill from his mudball world, away from his insane and genocidal governments with their sadistic laws, to take him to bed every night and laugh with him during the day- yes, that was what _Dorrek_ wanted. But if Bill didn’t see it the same way… Dorrek would take whatever small portion of Bill’s attention that he could get.

“With you,” Bill repeated, his smile growing and hopeful. “And we could be together openly? As partners, lovers?”

“Official prince consort, if that’s what you want,” Dorrek all but laughed, his heart instantly light. “Ambassador for Earth. Advisor to the heir. I just want you near me. To get to know you properly without being in constant states of panic. To find out if we’re going to be as good together as I suspect we will be.”

He held his breath and waited.

And Bill nodded. “I can’t leave forever,” he warned, and Dorrek nodded in return. “I have family here and I’m not going to abandon them. But six months, say, for a ‘research trip,’” he wiggled his fingers in the air to mark off those last two words. “And then see how we’re doing. Whether you’re sick of your technologically inferior mammal yet.”

“Or if you’re fighting the urge to space me out the airlock for my long list of personal flaws,” Dorrek teased him right back. He grew solemn again, tracing the sharp lines of Bill’s jaw with the edge of one finger.

“I’ve always wanted to know what was out here,” Bill replied. He kissed Dorrek as his answer, pulling him close, his body rising to meet Dorrek’s again and his scent flushing warm with desire. “I never expected to find anyone like you.”

“You gave me my life back,” Dorrek said. He bent his head to return Bill’s kiss, and the dozen unspoken promises it held. “Let me give you the stars in return.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is an epilogue still to come! <3


	16. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Officially the end. But what has everyone been up to since we saw them last?

“I wish I could go with you this time.” Dorrek’s grimace punctuated the almost-apology, but Bill shrugged it off just like he’d done the first couple of times. The hallway of the command ship gleamed silver, Bill’s sleek charcoal-grey suit the latest in Earth fashion—and one that made him stick out like a sore thumb against Imperial purple and green.

“It’s fine, honestly,” Bill reassured him, squeezing Dorrek’s hand. “It’s not a big holiday, just my mom’s birthday, and you’ve got a good excuse this time. Intergalactic peace negotiations can’t get put on pause because a monarch’s mother-in-law is turning sixty-five.”

It seemed to mollify Dorrek a little, and he brushed a gentle kiss against Bill’s forehead. Bill smiled at the familiar gesture, leaning in to accept the touch. Fifteen years—it had been almost _fifteen years_ since that fateful first meeting in the hills of New Mexico—and there were moments where Bill still had trouble believing any of it. Except Dorrek. Bill had no trouble at all believing in him.

“Still,” Dorrek replied, his smile wry. “I am the alien who abducted her son. I should pay tribute more often.”

“Keep describing family visits as ‘paying tribute’ and she’s going to stop letting you in the house at all.”

“It’s a hard habit to break. You knew my grandparents.”

That he had. They’d been somewhat less than amused by the stone-age monkey that their grandson had dragged home and installed in the quarters next to his in the imperial palace, and that first six months had been more stressful than Bill had been able to imagine when he’d first said goodbye to Earth. Only now Dorrek was Emperor, come into both his maturity and his inheritance, and life had settled into something vaguely approaching routine. For a life where spaceships and interstellar travel were routine, anyway.

“Your Excellency, your ship is ready.”

Bill nodded to the young Skrull woman standing by the open hangar door. “Thank you, Ard’ran. I’ll be right there.” Back to his conversation, Bill cupped Dorrek’s face in his hands. “Don’t concede anything we don’t have to. And don’t let Xavin shoot anyone, no matter how annoying Lilandra gets.”

Dorrek nodded solemnly, an amused light playing in his deep blue eyes. “Promise. As long as you refuse to let Tommy and Kate talk you into doing anything rash.”

“Mmm, I don’t know if that’s possible. But I do promise not to do anything that might get any of us arrested.”

Dorrek gave a beleaguered sigh. “I suppose that will have to do.” He covered Bill’s mouth with his own, Bill’s hands dropping to curl around fistfuls of Dorrek’s tunic. Fifteen years and _this_ was still amazing. Not just the kisses, or the way Dorrek’s touch still made his toes curl and his brain white out—but being able to do it at all, in public, with no risk of censure. It was freedom, the kind he’d never once in his youth imagined he could have, and every second was intoxicating.

“Stay in touch,” Bill murmured against Dorrek’s lips. “I’ll be back in a few days.”

“I’m counting on it. We all know the Empire will fall apart without you,” Dorrek teased, the taste of him lingering on Bill’s lips.

A discreet cough from behind them brought Bill back to the moment, and the very patient engineer waiting for him to get on the damn ship, already. He gave Dorrek’s hand one last squeeze and followed Ard’ran to the sleek interceptor shuttle waiting in the command ship’s large launch bay.

“Excellency.”

“Commander.” Bill returned the salutes offered to him in his role as Consort. He liked to think that some of the respect had been earned, rather than simply given because of who he was mated to… and at least a few of the salutes probably were. The jumppoint flickered on the large monitor, energies cascading and tumbling through a vortex invisible to the naked eye. A tiny void in the fabric of space, and on the other side—Earth.    

Time to see how much had changed.  

* * *

When Billy beamed down, it was directly to the guest room in Tommy and Kate’s sprawling uptown apartment. It was a routine they’d established years ago; their parents had been accepting of Bill’s new life, but only to a point. And teleporting into their living room, unintentionally scaring his father into something that had resembled a minor heart attack, had been that one bridge too far.

Now, though, it was old hat. Transport down in the late evening, bunk down in the guest room, and when everyone got up in the morning the kids would only know that Uncle Bill (and sometimes Uncle Bill’s Friend Ted) had arrived for a visit in the night while they were asleep. Neat and clean, and a lot less risk of one of the twins blabbing something at school the next day.

Bill shucked off his jacket and sat on the edge of the bed to untie his shoes. Lights blinked and burned outside the big windows, the cityscape unrolling into the distance beneath him. New York had changed a lot in fifteen years. Coming back every six months or so was enough time to let him see the changes as they happened and still be amazed by them.

The faintest of sensations—somewhere between a buzz and a sub-sonic ping—echoed in the bone behind his ear, and he rubbed the spot where the transponder was implanted. Signal received, confirmation sent. All is well. He hadn’t been thrilled with the idea of the subcutaneous implant at first. But after the second time he’d been kidnapped by enemies of the state, trying to get at Dorrek through the supposedly much-more-vulnerable Prince Consort, Bill’d had to grudgingly agree that maybe it was time.

A knock on the door was the only warning he got before it swung open and Tommy appeared. He closed the door behind him and crossed the floor, meeting Bill halfway. They hugged, hard and fierce, and a small wound in Bill’s heart healed itself over. (The scab would tear off again when he left; it did every time. But for the moment he was home and safe and all was well.)

Eventually they let go, Tommy’s grip loosening, and he flopped down to sit on the end of the guest bed. “Looking good, little brother.”

Bill joined him, shoes kicked off, one leg tucked beneath himself when he sat on the bed. “I’d say the same but I don’t know about that shirt,” he teased, flicking the hem of the gaudy yellow and green-striped button-up Tommy was sporting. “Fashion’s gone to hell in the last few years.”

And Tommy looked tired, something new in the creases that had started appearing at the corners of his eyes. He was aging, white strands appearing in his blond hair now that they were in their forties, but Bill’s hair was as dark and his crows-feet non-existent as the day he’d left. Something to do with living in space, maybe, or Skrull medical technology… But if it kept up, he realized with a sharp pang, Tommy would be an old man and Bill would still look like he was in his late twenties. All the more reason to-

“Strong words from a man living on spaceships crewed by spandex-wearing circus acrobats,” Tommy snorted, with that grin that meant he was really glad to see Bill. “How’s Big D?”

Bill took the distraction and ran with it gratefully. “Good. Disappointed that he can’t be here instead of at the summit, but he needs to attend this one in person. How’re Kate and the kids?”

“Kate’s gone down at the Park Sheraton to hear Dr. King speak. She’ll be back later tonight. And the kids are a handful,” Tommy snorted. “Two handfuls. This whole parenting thing is a lot harder than it looked when Mom and Dad were doing it.”

There; something in there was the problem that was making Tommy look tired, dimmed the light that usually shone from him brighter than a supernova. Was it the twins? “Are they bigger pains in the ass than we were?”

“Dude, _no-one_ could be bigger pains in the ass than we were. Though my kids come close from time to time.”

That wasn’t it, and a frown creased Bill’s forehead. Then what- “What’s up? And don’t tell me nothing, because I know you pretty well. Something serious is eating at you.”

Tommy sighed and rubbed his face, pressing the heel of his hand against his eyes before resurfacing. “Dad’s not doing well.” Four words was all it took to dig into Bill’s heart and set it aching, panic rising thick in his throat.

“His heart again?”

“Yeah. He hasn’t needed to go in for surgery yet, but his doctor’s not thrilled. And mom’s tired. I don’t think she’s sleeping much. You know how she gets when she’s worried.”

“I’m familiar.” Bill forced himself to breathe out, tried to send the fear away with the air and think clearly. He was away too much, away too long, and now this-

“Do you think they’ll finally let me take them back with me for a while? A short vacation and a few treatments at the medical center on Throneworld and he’ll be _fine_.” Mostly fine, anyway. Skrull medicine was a whole different animal and usually didn’t involve surgery, but the best surgeons of a lot of other species _were_ available, and their tech was a whole lot better than Earth’s rude scalpels and fabric bandages.

Tommy—usually the first one to make fun of him for his attempts to ease their parents into Bill’s new reality—only nodded. “You can try talking to them. No guarantees they’ll go for it.”

“It’s worth a try. Dad got used to the concept of flying in an airplane, and spaceships are a hell of a lot safer than those.”

He wasn’t sure Tommy was going to agree, but then his twin nodded and seemed to relax. “Honest to God, Billy. Even if he says no, I’m ready to bean him over the head and send him up there with you regardless. There’s got to be some benefit to having a brother who’s prince of space.”

Bill stifled a laugh. “Prince of _space_? You know that’s not a real title, right?”

“I’m sure as hell not calling you Queen of Space. People might get the wrong idea.” Tommy grinned, the light back in his eyes, and any indignity was worth it just for that.

“I don’t know about _that_ , honey-” Bill drawled, and Tommy laughed, so infectious that Bill couldn’t help but join in.

The door creaked open again and their laughter died, Tommy sitting up and whipping around to see who was coming in. “Daddy?” His daughter stood there, long nightgown and bathrobe on, stifling a yawn behind her hand. “Uncle Bill!” she yelped and flung herself across the room into his arms. “When did you get here?”

Bill caught her and gave her a squeeze, marvelling for a minute at the changes. Eleanor had to be at least three or four inches taller than the last time Bill had seen her, and he’d swear it hadn’t been that long ago. She still looked a lot more like Tommy than she did Kate, her long hair blonde rather than Kate’s black, and her eyes a brilliant shade of green.

“Ellie, what are you doing up? It’s way past your bedtime,” Tommy scolded, and for an instant Bill heard their mother’s voice in Tommy’s inflection. He hid his grin in Ellie’s hair before letting her go.

“Da _ddy_ ,” Ellie groaned, rolling her eyes at them both. “I’m almost _twelve,_ that’s practically a _grownup_. An eight-thirty bedtime is for babies. And you didn’t answer the question.” She gave Bill an eagle-eyed stare, and he saw Kate’s penetrating ‘I know you’re lying to me’ look written across her daughter’s face. “When did you get here? I didn’t hear the front door and I’ve been awake all night.”

Lying felt wrong, especially when she was staring him down like that. “I was hiding in the closet the entire time,” Bill dead-panned.

“Duh, we all knew _that_ ,” Ellie fired back impulsively, then shot a chagrined look at her father, biting her lip.  

Bill looked at Tommy as well, who at least had the good grace to look stunned. “Ellie?” Bill’s mind raced. He was safe—all he had to do was call for his ride and he’d be back in the Empire. But Kate and Tommy were already on a half-dozen watchlists thanks to their involvement in various rights movements. Having Bill’s name get out there as a possible ‘subversive’ would only cause more trouble.

She dug her toe into the carpet, but after a half-second lifted her chin, apparently having decided to brazen it out. “I only mean that you should bring Uncle Ted with you next time. He knows better games.”

“ _Uncle_ Ted?” Billy echoed, torn between his worry, and being utterly bemused. It helped that Dorrek would be absolutely over the moon at the idea, the big softy.

“Let’s keep that title just between family members, kitten,” Tommy cut in, his expression shifting through a few options before it landed on one Bill recognized as ‘this might as well happen.’ “Some people aren’t smart enough to understand having two uncles.”

“Some people are too dumb for life,” she scoffed.

“And that would be your mother talking. I recognize that one. _But_ ,” Bill said quickly, “moving on. Ted- _Uncle_ Ted,” he added, grinning wide, “is on a work trip. He told me to say hi to everyone, and I promise to bring him with me next time.”

“Fine, he’s excused,” Ellie declared. “But only this once.”

“Her majesty has spoken,” Tommy muttered under his breath, then took his daughter by the arm and started steering her toward the door. “And now it’s bedtime. Uncle Bill and I have things to talk about, and you need sleep.”

“Ellie,” Bill interrupted before they vanished into the hallway. “About Uncle Ted and I- does Max know?”

“Does Max know what?” Ellie’s twin brother appeared out of the half-lit hall, stifling a yawn. He had Kate’s dark hair, tumbling over his forehead in a familiar messy disaster of the kind even hair gel wouldn’t cure. Bill would know.

A door closed with a firm thunk. “Hey guys, I’m home! No riots, unfortunately, though at one point I thought it was going to come close-” The click of heels down the hallway heralded Kate’s arrival, her voice coming closer. “What’s everyone doing up? Did the party start without me? Billy!”

“Uncle Bill’s here!”

“It’s _bedtime._ ”

“How long have you been here?”

“I’m not going to bed now and you can’t make me!”

Bill let himself be swept up into the chaos of Kate’s welcome hugs, the twins’ chatter, Tommy’s vain attempts to get them herded back to their own rooms, and everything else wonderful and familiar.

He only had a few days this time, not nearly enough—and while he was selfish enough to imagine all kinds of ways he could kidnap the whole Shepherd clan and take them back with him, he knew in his heart that he wouldn’t. It was the devil’s bargain he’d struck all those years ago, and even knowing then what he knew now, he wouldn’t change it. Couldn’t change it, not for anything.

But God, was it ever good to know that no matter how far into the universe he roamed, there would always be _two_ planets that he could happily call home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cris prompted me to do an epilogue, and so an epilogue Cris must have! To all my readers, commenters and inspirations, thank you. <3
> 
> Ellie and Max are named for 616 Kate's mother and Grandpa Mags, respectively (yes, even though they're all Kaplans in this one. It's a great name for a Jewish kid born in the early 1950s.)

**Author's Note:**

> Originally from a flashfic prompt, this thing grew again. 
> 
> Follow me on Tumblr at ardatli.tumblr.com!


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